Comebacks we'd like to see: #11 -- 45 rpm vinyls

This post is part of our series ranking the top 25 bygone products and trends we'd like to see return.

I've always loved the year I was born -- 1970. To me, it was this perfect time when the world was modern and advanced, and yet still with one foot in this quaint and old-fashioned universe. What do I mean? Well, on one hand, we had traveled to the Moon by this time! Yet the country was still using rotary telephones, there were only three television networks, MTV was just letters in alphabet soup, and, yes, we were listening to vinyl albums.

I almost missed that era -- I didn't really start buying music semi-regularly until the early 1980s and 45 rpms, the small version of the big vinyl records, were going out of style, as were the bigger vinyl albums, being replaced by cassette tapes. But vinyl records were still selling in the 1980, and I clearly remember when Bruce Willis, then star of TV's Moonlighting, came out with a single, "Respect Yourself." I probably bicycled over to my local K-mart, or embarked on one of my early drives in the family car, bought the 45 and happily listened to it in my room, taking a brief break from listening to my favorite artists, Huey Lewis and Debbie Gibson.

Ah, good times.

Anyway, the beauty of the 45 was that -- unlike today -- you could buy a song for a buck and you didn't have to purchase the entire album. That's sadly something that kids... er... oh, yeah. Downloadable, often for free if illegal, music.

So you may well wonder, especially if you're under the age of 30, why anyone would want the 45's to come back. I do think I have one good argument.