When the needle drops, Elias Rahbani’s 1972 album Mosaic of the Orient (Näi, Buzuk & Guitar) cascades out from a Technics SL-1300GE-K turntable and a colossal pair of Tasmanian-made Pitt & Giblin Superwax speakers. I’m in the Listening Room – a temple for audiophiles, and to the vinyl record – in Melbourne’s Acmi, as part of Rising festival’s new exhibition The Vinyl Factory: Reverb. The gear sounds extraordinary – and it is only one story in a room filled with countless more.

Rising music curator and Triple R host Yasmine Sharaf remembers the moment she spotted that rare Rahbani record, on a 47C day at a Cairo market. “Record shopping is really hard in Egypt. Everything usually has no cover and is covered in dust. It was sitting on the very top in complete sun. Somehow in perfect condition, not warped or melted. You’d think it would just be a puddle. I feel I was supposed to find it and save it.”

Stories like this one are why record collectors love vinyl: those fragile repositories of music, personal memories, history, politics, technological advances, social movements, migration and culture – all of which is celebrated in The Vinyl Factory: Reverb. One standout inside is a documentary on Detroit techno (the genre’s birthplace) that links the transatlantic slave trade to the city’s funk musicians, auto industry, resident poets and Afro-futurist dance music. Then there’s Carsten Nicolai’s 1998 work, bausatz noto, where attendees can manipulate four turntables to create their own live compositions from records loaded with endlessly looping sound fragments.

In the Listening Room – a voluminous space capable of holding about 40 people on tiered seating and padded stools – Sharaf has curated a selection of records, from Miles Davis to Ryuichi Sakamoto, that visitors can ask an attendant to play. “This is not performance art, you don’t need to watch me. Come pick a record,” Cara, a gallery attendant, calls out.

“Vinyl culture has had a tendency to be gatekept and controlled by middle-aged white dudes of certain disposable income levels,” says Sharaf. “We’ve made so many progressions in the last five or 10 years … opening it up to young people of different experience. It could have so easily been a Bowie listening room.”

It’s all happening in the city recently dubbed “the vinyl capital of the world”, thanks in part to a report by the Victorian Music Development Office on the state’s vinyl music industry, For the Record, which claims Melbourne has the most vinyl record stores per capita in the world (5.9 stores per 100,000 residents). While accurate on its own terms, the per-capita statistic is arbitrary in relation to the experience of record shopping in, say, Tokyo (just 2.3 stores per 100,000 residents, according to the study). Take Shinjuku’s Disk Union main store, one of many such examples, which is effectively eight hyper-specific stores in one.

Melbourne’s claim to vinyl capital of the world is arguably skewed by Tokyo’s population density; a comparison of store inventories would paint a more accurate picture. Many of the prominent secondhand sellers in Melbourne’s “Collingwood-Fitzroy corridor” (which has 19 record stores over 2.5 sq km) – including The Searchers, Plug Seven and Licorice Pie – prop up their inventories with fastidiously well-kept Japanese imports. When I visited The Searchers on Smith Street recently, one of the owners was in Japan on one of several annual buying trips.

But what we do know is Australians are buying more vinyl year on year, spending $44.5m in 2024, up 5.6% on the previous year. Vinyl currently makes up 72.8% of the total revenue we spend on physical media.

But while we are spending more on vinyl, many independent labels and artists are not driven by profit – particularly given the rising production and shipping costs. Vinyl releases do supplement meagre streaming revenues, but they carry a different sort of value too: as a physical product that bestows cultural relevance on an artist or band.

“I don’t want to call vinyl an advertisement, it’s not just that – but it’s a loss leader,” says Corey Kikos, who, with Maryos Syawish, puts out techno records as the duo Sleep D on their label, Butter Sessions.

Kikos and Michael Kucyk, the founder of the label Efficient Space, will stage their second Independent Music Exchange on 7 June at Northcote Town Hall – a sprawling record fair for more than 50 independent labels.

Kucyk has run Efficient Space for 10 years (he is also hosting The Listening Room on 17 July) and has dedicated a significant amount of his output to rereleases of obscure independent music, often with elaborate liner notes and sleeve designs. Kucyk gives me a perplexed stare when I ask if pressing vinyl is becoming economically unviable.

“I’ve never really thought of an alternative,” he admits. “But at no point would I reconsider another format or going strictly digital. I’ve been buying records for 20 years. It’s like oxygen. People keep photo albums, I keep records.”

The claim that Melbourne is the vinyl capital of the world may be up for debate – but the city sure does love it. It’s no accident the hospitality mega-group Merivale has co-opted vinyl’s cultural cool and opened LBs Record Bar, a vinyl-focused bar, as its first Melbourne venue (JAM Record bar, also operated by Merivale, opened in Sydney in 2024). And “listening bars” – venues that sell themselves as places to listen to curated music on high-quality audio systems – have swept Australia’s capital cities in recent years. Many claim to be inspired by Japan’s jazz kissa, but it’s rare to see the same quiet reverence for the music among the punters here.

“There are so many great bars in this city with really good speakers but they’re not really listening bars,” says DJ Nik Thorup, who regularly plays at Waxflower, one of Australia’s more authentic listening bars. “All you should be able to hear is the music.”

Thorup and yoga teacher, DJ and architect Stephanie Kitingan co-own Tender, a sound and movement studio in Brunswick that holds three-hour, vinyl-only “deep listening” sessions every week, revolving around a set of Pitt & Giblin Superwax Mini speakers. Talking during the sessions isn’t permitted, but other free-form relaxing activities or moments of connection are encouraged.

For people like Kitingan and Thorup, listening to vinyl is a way of reclaiming one’s attention from the algorithms designed to steal it.

“You come in and take your shoes off. There are no mirrors anywhere. The sound is the anchor. Even the yoga practice is not really an exercise focus. It is philosophical, it is breath,” says Kitingan. “Attention and intention really underlies what we do.”

At the session I attend, there are roughly 20 folk sprawled out on yoga mats and pillows among soothing low lighting, timber and acoustic panels, designed by Kitingan. One listener stretches. Others knit, draw, read or embrace. One or two scroll. Some lie immobile, eyes covered by weighted beanbags. For three hours they share one simple thing: the sounds coming from the grooves on a flat black disc, as it spins around and around and around, until it’s time to flip to the other side.

Most record collectors will tell you that it’s about the community as much as the music. For Sharaf, it’s the crossover of the two – and all those record stores, venues, bars and clubs – that make Melbourne a vinyl lover’s dream.

“You’ve gotta make fertile ground for music culture to grow. We have so many record stores. In bar culture now there’s [often] a DJ playing really deep cuts. Our music literacy has become so high,” she says. “This is what has made Melbourne such an amazing music city. It’s very much something that is worth protecting.”

• Rising and Acmi’s The Vinyl Factory: Reverb is on now. The Independent Music Exchange runs 6–7 June at Northcote Town Hall. Tender’s “deep listening” sessions run weekly.