A certain Kurt Hamster, of uk.rec.audio "fame", writes :

Why do you think they're being sold cheap in charity shops ? Clue :
nobody wants them anymore.

If that's the case then why do they get snapped up from the charity
shops pretty damn quickly?

Even in the specialist second hand vinyl shops, prices of vinyl are very
low. There is a market there, but it's not all that big. If it was,
vinyl prices would rise dramatically, particularly as the discs -
particularly pristine ones (for as we all know, vinyl's physical-contact
mechanism inherently wears out the grooves as the disc is played)
become rarer.

I have quite a lot of vinyl myself I might add, which I never play. It's
nice to have from a collectors point of view, and also the cover artwork
and the sometimes-included posters are great to have. None of that is
anything to do with the music, obviously.

Could it also be that "nobody wants them any more" because the industry
has decided they can't have them any more?

Why did it decide that ?

The simpler and more probable explanation is that (a) consumers
preferred the sound of CD and (b) in terms of the mass market, consumers
preferred CD's small size, practicality, and extra features
(skip/search, 74 minute playback time) etc.

Most of the people I know who listen to music avidly are
musicians, and it is those people who seem most convinced of the
superiority of analogue/vinyl over digital/CD.

Then why do they keep recording on digital equipment and releasing their
albums on digital media ?

Digital equipment - they all don't
Digital media - they have no choice.

There is little choice with recording, as new analogue recording devices
have pretty much vanished. I am afraid this idea that everyone hates
digital and only uses it because they are forced to do so isn't grounded
in reality. If there was a real demand for analogue recorders, then
there would be someone out there manufacturing them to fill that niche.

--

"Jokes mentioning ducks were considered particularly funny." - cnn.com