A river of sounds flows through the Ocean Drive hotel in Barcelona, ??attracting music lovers and collectors from all over the Catalan city to its banks. The public gathers in front of stands loaded with analog music and waits for their turn to play history, dancing to the sound of nostalgic songs. Many hold bags in which you can guess the outlines of vinyl records that they have already managed to acquire. Ocean Drive in Barcelona, ??like every year, provides shelter to the sound universe Hello Sundays! with its more than 20,000 second-hand vinyls.
“At ten in the morning – two hours before the start of the fair – when we were setting up the stands, people already came to look for records by their favorite artists,” Siscu Raya, general director of Ocean Drive in Barcelona, ??proudly states. The place chosen for the seventh edition of Hola Sundays! it is always the same; Furthermore, the roots of both the hotel and the fair are in Ibiza, known for its DJ culture.
Visitors to the market explore music in a more romantic way, by touch, sliding their fingers through boxes of records, scattered throughout the ground floor.
The vinyl selection process is very individual: some look for covers, others look for a specific album or artist, some have a date and want to give a memorable gift to their partner. Sometimes you have to trust your intuition and choose at random, however, if you want to go straight, some market stands offer headphones to listen to the records, enjoying the whole ritual: opening the vinyl, taking it out of its case, cleaning it. , put it on the record player and hear the crunch that takes you to another dimension and other times.
The records are organized in boxes by different genres, years and even countries, depending on the seller. Ángel Prats, owner of the Fira Disc store and a great Beatles collector, highlights that the sale of vinyl from the eighties and nineties and genres such as Britpop and funk are booming, while those from the sixties continue to lose popularity due to lack of interest from generation Z, who are the biggest buyers of vinyl at the moment.
“Adults already buy very little, because they usually have a large collection and only look for what they lack. On the contrary, young people are at the beginning of the path, they are attracted by the format, the image, because it is something different from the others,” says Ángel Prats. Although 50% of vinyl buyers do not even have equipment to play the records, according to a report carried out in the United States and Canada by the consulting firm Luminate Data, the sale of vinyl continues to grow and the records become valuable objects of art.
It’s no surprise. Almost since the beginning of the full-length album format, covers have been a key piece to seduce music lovers. The best photographers and designers of those times worked to create small works of art full of references and puzzles. However, with the arrival of the digital age, the magic of searching for music has been lost: instead of sliding our fingers through the records, we slide them across the screen and barely pay attention to the little icon on the cover.
In addition, music on vinyl is very expensive and, according to Billboard data from 2022, the average price is around 27 euros per record. The prices for Hola Sundays! They are much cheaper, 40% less than in the largest source markets of the United States and England, according to Siscu Raya, because most of the pieces are second-hand, which allows you to avoid taxes and delivery costs.
Hello Sundays! It is held annually in Ibiza (in summer), Barcelona and Madrid, with several workshops and DJ sessions, and admission is free.
