A posting on Slashdot lets us know that Time magazine is jumping on the “vinyl is back” bandwagon. (Billboard ($) did the story first, back in November.)

Writes Kristina Dell:

From college dorm rooms to high school sleepovers, an all-but-extinct music medium has been showing up lately. And we don’t mean CDs. Vinyl records, especially the full-length LPs that helped define the golden era of rock in the 1960s and ’70s, are suddenly cool again. Some of the new fans are baby boomers nostalgic for their youth. But to the surprise and delight of music executives, increasing numbers of the iPod generation are also purchasing turntables (or dusting off Dad’s), buying long-playing vinyl records and giving them a spin.

Wow, what a trend! Why, LP sales went up more than 15 percent last year, it turns out. The only problem is that that increase–some 130,000 total–represents about three-hundredths of one percent of the 500 million CDs sold last year.

Time ends the short piece with a list of three benefits the LP has over CDs. The third details the “social interaction” of “getting up to flip over a record.” The utter marginality of this trend will not stop the story from being a staple of boomer news outlets for the next few months.