How Taylor Swift Took Over Your Local Record Store

Over the past decade, pop has gone from a fringe seller at record shops to one of their bestselling genres.

With his Instagram posts of old Thrasher magazine covers, flyers of seminal post-hardcore group Jawbox, and pictures with Neko Case, Matt Jencik is not your stereotypical Taylor Swift target. The 50-year-old, long-haired, bespectacled longtime buyer for Chicago’s legendary Reckless Records admits he’d probably be listening to Van Halen at home. But in records stores like Reckless and around the country, things have changed drastically.

“I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d have to think about Taylor Swift [vinyl] as much as I do now,” Jencik, who’s worked at the store for more than two decades, says with a warm chuckle. “I have to hustle so hard to get that stuff because it always sells out really fast, it’s hard to find, and people want it. If we don’t have it, it’s a problem. It’s changed how I approach my job.”

Jencik is one of many record store reps nationwide who’ve seen a similar shift over the past several years. As a Rolling Stone analysis of the 100 bestselling vinyl albums of each year since 2012 shows, pop is taking over from rock as the medium’s dominant genre. As vinyl has once again become a mainstream listening and collectible format, vinyl buyers are getting increasingly younger, several owners say, and the most popular albums have shifted from the indie rock and classic rock catalog albums that defined vinyl’s resurgence in the past decade to mainstream pop records from the likes of Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Lana Del Rey.