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Vinyl Refuses To Stop Spinning

(CBS) -- Old and new musical artists – including some who were on the Grammy Awards Sunday– are pressing LPs, which now account for 6 percent of all music sold.

CBS 2's Jim Williams reports.

He is all of 21, but Hank Bieber prefers to listen to music the old-fashioned way -- on a vinyl album.

"There's nothing just like holding an old record -- the smell of it, looking at the lyrics on the back page, following along," he says.

With CDs and MP3 players, vinyl had gone the way of black and white televisions. But 33s and even 45s are back in a big way, even among the very young.

"It is here to stay. The resurgence in vinyl everybody took as sort of a momentary blip, a trend, a flash. But it's more than a trend now," Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot says.

Nielson reports vinyl recordings jumped 52 percent in 2014.

A record-pressing plant in Dallas is going gangbusters.

Michael Paeth was so confident in vinyl, he opened Mile Long Records in Wheaton this past October, and the momentum has kept going after the holidays.

"I thought it was really going to slow down a lot, and it hasn't," he says.

How has this happened? Many music lovers say vinyl just sounds better.

"It sounds warm. It sounds like real human beings making music," Kot says.

And there's a good reason why many believe it's a superior to streaming music or downloads.

Columbia College professor and audio expert Pantelis Vassilakis demonstrates on a computer that digital recordings don't have as much data, so the sound is not as rich.

But there's more to vinyl than the sound. There are the album covers themselves.

"Most kids can't afford a Picasso and hang it on their wall, but they can afford a double gate full sleeve copy of the Stooges' 'Fun House,'" Kot says.

Vinyl is timeless. Hank Bieber even made a special purchase for his parents: a turntable.

About half of the top selling LPs in 2014 are from newer artists including Jack White, Arctic Monkeys, Lana Del ray and the Black Keys.

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