What is the actual percentage of people exclusively listening to vinyl vs digital?

Howdy, @edcyn! I wouldn’t be surprised if we were familiar faces to each other (in the 90’s I looked a lot like Neil Young in the Buffalo Springfield days, complete with the sideburns). Working in the Classical Annex (which I frequented at least several times a month), you undoubtedly knew the Sunset Video store manager Jay Smith (Axl Rose worked in the Video store for a while, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer in the Pop store across the street). And regional sales manager Bob Fetryl, one of the most unpleasant sob’s I ever had to deal with in the record biz.

I was offered the Panorama store to manage, but had heard about the drive-by-shootings they experienced sporadically. No thanks! When the Amoeba store opened on Sunset, it was all over for the Hollywood Tower down the street (across the street from the Classical Annex). Amoeba is an amazing record store! I also shopped at Book Soup, a coupla doors down from the Annex. Ringo showed up at the book signing event the shop hosted when Levon Helm’s autobiography was released. He took cuts in line. ;-)

The singles buyer at the Tower Pop store was Jim Laspesa, who for a time was drumming in Dave Davies (The Kinks’ guitarist) band. When the live gig with Emitt Rhodes came up in ’97 (his first in a quarter century), Jim wanted it SO bad (all us Power Pop aficionados hold Emitt in very high regard). Sorry Jim (I got the gig ;-) .

When I was searching for a house to buy in 2003, Pasadena was one place I looked (without luck). I love the town. Have you been to Brian Berdan’s shop yet? Very nice. Shelia Berdan asked me to put a band together to play at the 50th birthday party she threw for Brooks a few years before he died. Brooks was a drummer in High School, and he got up on my kit and played "Wipe Out" with the band. Happiest I ever saw the man! I knew he was suffering from Crohn’s Disease, but I don’t think anyone knew (or even thought) it was gonna kill him.

I spent a lot of Saturdays in Brooks Berdan Ltd., soaking it all in. Brooks had some pretty flush customers, who thought nothing of buying a complete VTL or Jadis/big Wilson system. My woman and I accompanied Brooks and Sheila to a number of the Vegas CES’, where I got to take a look behind the curtain of the hi-fi biz. A real education. Brooks turned me on to Music Reference and Eminent Technology products, which I own to this day.

I’m old enough for LP’s to have been the only album format available (my first records were 7" 45RPM singles). I never went for pre-recorded 8-tracks or cassettes, already being an audiophile by the time they were introduced. I held out against CD’s for as long as possible, always buying a new release on LP if it was offered. By sometime in the early-90’s, very few new releases were being offered on LP. What was I gonna do---not buy a new release just because it was on CD only? By that time I had a collection of somewhere around 5000 LP’s. I accepted the situation and began acquiring new music on CD, over the next coupla decades amassing a CD library of in the neighborhood of 7000-8000 of the little silver devils.

In 2015, after the deaths of quite a few longtime friends and musical comrades (including hi-fi retailer Brooks Berdan, whose LP collection dwarfed mine by multiples), the matter of my mortality and remaining time left on Earth came into focus for me. How many hours of music listening time do I have left?, I wondered. With that consideration as well as an upcoming major relocation approaching, I decided to go through all my discs and get rid of the titles that, though cool albums, I knew I was never going to listen to again. Why have an album you’re never going to play? Just to have it? Those and the titles I had never cracked the shrink-wrap on, and admitted to myself were no longer of interest to me.

I know the used product manager at Amoeba Records in Hollywood (he was a sales rep for one of the larger Indi record distributors when I was the Indi product buyer at a Tower Records), and he gave me top dollar for the discs I brought him: around 1500 LP’s and a few thousand CD’s. He couldn’t use the 1000 Classical CD’s I had to sell, but Atomic Records on Magnolia Blvd. (a very cool little shop, owned by two Jazz-loving brothers. They have and use a VPI or Nitty Gritty RCM---I can’t remember which, better than most shops.) in Burbank bought them all.

It wasn’t until I started reading all you LP hounds posting in the "What’s On Your Turntable Tonight" thread here on Audiogon, and watching all the Vinyl Community members posting videos on YouTube in which they showcase their collections and/or new LP acquisitions---especially this past year, everyone sitting around the house for months at a time---that I started buying new and used LP’s again on a regular basis. They’re SO much more fun and engaging than CD’s, regardless of the difference in sound.

I have a lot of music I love that has been released only on CD. I know @slaw (and maybe some others) is an LP purist, but I can’t do that. Many of my favorite Classical albums have never been available on anything other than CD, and plenty of Pop (all non-Classical genres) too. I’m a bi-guy, okay? ;-) It’s all about the music, before the format, or even the recorded sound quality for that matter.