LOS ANGELES — Neil Schield knows the grim state of the music business as well as anyone — last year, he was laid off from a company at the vanguard of digital music distribution.

But this month Schield began an unlikely second act: He opened a brick-and-mortar record store in Los Angeles' Echo Park neighborhood, with racks of tasteful inventory carrying price tags as high as $100 in an age when "digital" and "free" seem to rule the day. Schield's shop, Origami Vinyl, stocks only new vinyl LPs, presumed not long ago to be as dead as eight-track tapes.

Origami is just one of at least three such shops opening in Los Angeles this spring. The others are Vacation and Little Radio. The small boom is the result of a commercial rediscovery and appreciation of vinyl records by collectors and more casual audiences.

"Sometimes I wonder, what am I doing?" Schield confessed. But "it's the only corner of the physical music business that's growing."

If Schield needed any assurance he was on the right track, it came even before Origami opened. Pete Townshend, The Who guitarist — who had seen a blog item about the shop — dropped by to see if it was open.

The return of the scruffy neighborhood record shop is as unexpected as the revival of vinyl. After CDs hit the U.S. market in 1983, LPs were deemed largely obsolete. Later, a consumer shift to file-trading and online retail outlets such as iTunes and www.Amazon.com gutted the storefront music business. Between 2003 and 2008, more than 3,000 record stores closed in the U.S. Independent shops accounted for nearly half the losses, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a database and marketing firm.

There are 185 record stores in the Los Angeles area today, down from 259 at the beginning of 2007.

But as mass marketing of LPs faded, some listeners began rediscovering vinyl. It's not just older fans who grew up with the format who attest to its pleasures — the arresting artwork, the labor of love that goes into flipping LP sides and the fact that many audiophiles say vinyl sounds better. Younger listeners raised on MP3s can see LPs as a kind of talisman.

"I've always marveled at every new generation of 15-year-old boys who go to the Doors vinyl section and say, 'Wow, an original Doors LP!' " said Marc Weinstein, founder of Amoeba Music, a three-store chain whose Hollywood branch is among the largest independent retail record stores in the U.S. "Major labels should have capitalized on this years ago."

Slowly, they are, by pressing a growing list of vinyl reissues and new albums by marquee artists such as U2. Nielsen SoundScan reported 1.88 million sales of new LPs last year, up 89 percent from 2007. And that figure is almost certainly conservative, as many independent retailers do not report their sales to SoundScan (which says that more than two-thirds of vinyl albums are sold at indie operations).

Of course, to play a record, you need a turntable — and the market has responded with low-cost models that are more versatile than their earlier counterparts. Crosley Radio, for example, specializes in retro-styled record players sold in stores such as Target, Macy's and Urban Outfitters. Its basic model retails for less than $80; for a little more, there's a version with a USB port so the music can be downloaded to a computer. (Many LPs also come with free digital download cards.)

"By the end of 2008, over 50 percent of our business was in new vinyl, which amounts to millions of dollars a year," said Matt Wishnow, founder of New York-based online music retailer www.Insound.com. Its turntable sales rose 200 percent in 2008, with the company shipping dozens daily during the holiday season.

Online retailers are not the only ones profiting from the market for new LPs. Now, it might have reached a point where it's self-sustaining for the kind of small independent store once done in by downloading.

In Los Angeles' Los Feliz district, Vacation falls squarely in the area's tradition of impressively bearded young men hawking exotic imported albums. "We're banking on people liking vinyl for the long haul," said co-owner Mark Thompson, who also co-founded the experimental-metal label Hydra Head Records. "With CDs you have an obligation to keep a low price tier. But with vinyl, if you do awesome work, you don't have to worry so much about the cost."

Although that is true for some collectors, others might think a $25 double-gatefold LP is more an indulgence than a necessity, especially in today's economy. And the high price of manufacturing, shipping and stocking vinyl won't be dropping any time soon.

Even some devotees are skeptical about the new stores' prospects, given their lack of offbeat used vinyl (although Vacation carries a small selection). "It's all well and good to go out and buy the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Iron and Wine, but you need to have something different and exclusive going on to keep people coming back for that unknown quantity," said Scott Tarasco, a Los Angeles collector who spends hundreds of dollars a month on LPs. "Quality used vinyl flies out the door. There's got to be something in there that's going to throw me for a loop."

At Amoeba — whose size and clout give it chain-store advantages alongside its indie credibility with music fans — new and used vinyl accounts for no more than 20 percent of sales, according to founder Weinstein.

And even with the recent uptick in vinyl sales, the general outlook for music retail still looks grim. In the past year, total U.S. album sales were down 14 percent from 2007, a figure that includes a 32 percent gain in digital album sales, according to SoundScan figures.

But such dire statistics don't dampen the enthusiasm of the new retailers, who have faith that the crackle of a vinyl record is one of the few things music fans will rely on.

"To me, it's just awesome that there are all these other new stores," Thompson said. "It reassures me that I'm not doing something totally stupid."