April’s launch of the UK’s first weekly vinyl chart by the Official Charts Company shows that sales of vinyl albums and singles are soaring, as hipsters and music lovers turn back to traditional records. This demand is making sweet music for Woodland Entertainment, a specialist division of Essex-based global freight forwarder Woodland Group.
The revival means that Woodland Entertainment ships a good amount of the UK’s vinyl worldwide, including some of the titles that made it into the inaugural vinyl charts.
Kevin Stevens, Chairman and CEO of the Woodland Group, says: “While consumers are turning to digital downloads to upload tracks to their 64gb iPod, a growing number of collectors continue to prefer vinyl as their format of choice. Woodland Entertainment is in tune with this demand and is proud to be shipping many of the albums that have made it into the UK’s first weekly vinyl chart.”
Vinyl records have been manufactured in eight formats since 1894. Ninety percent of the vinyl being handled by Woodland Entertainment are Long Play (LP) records. 45rpm singles are also shipped by the company.
LPs are straightforward products that present only one issue to Woodland Entertainment – they cannot exceed temperatures of 40 Celsius, above which they become damaged. All Woodland Entertainment shipments travel by airfreight. A typical consignment is one or two pallets, around 2,000 records.
Woodland Entertainment is a specialised Woodland Group division and has a representative in New York. Regis Dewaey, Woodland Entertainment Export Operations Supervisor, oversees exports of vinyl from North America to the UK.
Adds Maurizio Piroddi, Director of Woodland Entertainment: “Despite predictions that CDs – then MP3s and streaming – would render vinyl obsolete, sales reached an 18-year high last year at 1.29 million. We have seen ourselves how vinyl has recovered. A few years ago, for every thousand CDs a music label might release, they would ship 100 vinyl records. Now, it is typically 300 vinyl records.
“The young generation has discovered vinyl for the first time, just as they have embraced a taste for vintage clothes, retro furniture and artisan, old-fashioned foodstuffs. At Woodland Entertainment we use the most modern of freight equipment to safely and quickly handle this most old-fashioned of music technology.”
