It's becoming clear that the appeal of vinyl is two-fold. On the one hand there are older buyers who are returning to it as a validation of their own life journey though music and, on the other, there are young enthusiasts whose honeymoon with virtual music has tailed off and who enjoy vinyl's physicality. And then there's the whole dance music DJ subculture too. All three groups are small fry – boutique collectors' markets – compared to the world of streaming and downloads, but they are growing again. If it is a bubble, it's a long way from bursting.

The big vinyl storm in the US media over the last month has been a kerfuffle about VNYL, the service that hoped to do for vinyl what Lovefilm used to do for DVDs. The idea, backed by a hefty and successful Kickstarter campaign, was VNYL would send members three records, based on their stated tastes and chosen by connoisseurs. These could be listened to and returned, to be replaced with others. Sounds like a dreadful idea. Vinyl is delicate and surely one of its pleasures is ownership? If there are scratches, they've been earned at your own parties and late nights.

Record Store Day – 18 April – has been whipping up discord among independent labels. Notably, Sonic Cathedral are boycotting it, instead releasing 365 copies of an EP by Spectres and Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, one a day, over the next year. The problem, these voices of protest say, is that that while Record Store Day used to be a fun-fuelled opportunity to focus on especially curated releases by smaller operations, ones who cared about music, now it’s simply a chance for the majors to rake in bucks off the back of “a Mumford & Sons 7” or an overpriced Noel Gallagher 12”.

Did you know there's a heated debate going on about “hot stampers”? As the resurgence in vinyl continues, there are those who wish to attribute value to their own knowledge and to their vinyl collections. In the e-consumer trenches, where audiophiles heatedly discuss purchasing and repurchasing classic albums, there’s been much debate about major label reproductions from digital masters, about how they lose the richness of the originals.

Did you know that Jack White’s Lazaretto album sold nearly 87,000 copies on vinyl last year? Sales continue to rise all over with European manufacturing facilities running at full tilt. Given the demand for vinyl has risen 800% in the last decade, that’s not so surprising. Dance music, as ever, lauds the format, with the massive Tomorrowland rave/festival in Belgium this July announcing a vinyl-only stage to be headed up by long time aficionado, Sven Väth. theartsdesk on Vinyl also continues to celebrate this resurgence with our wide-ranging monthly round-up.

Have you been to a record shop lately? Now that our honeymoon with virtual music is revealed as completely lacking romance, record shops are thriving again. And it’s not CDs these shoppers are after. Those have been squeezed off into a far corner stocking only immediately sellable fare such as The Beatles, The Smiths, Led Zep, and early Oasis. No, the rest of the shop has been taken over by hoards, layers, tranches of alphabetized 12” vinyl, ordered by genre. Whether it’s regarded as whacky retro chic or simply a return to the “good old days”, vinyl boom times are here.