He is known for his work on consumption and material culture as well as icons and nostalgia which are all themes of his book with Ian Woodward, Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (2015).
[4][5] Nabeel Zuberi in the journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music praised the authors for the throughness of their research, saying "Vinyl is a vital work to spin, mix and play off more textualist feminist scholarship and critical race studies on phonographic culture" but felt that the authors could have given more attention to the economic aspects of the vinyl resurgence and noted that most of the interviewees were white European men.
[7] Anne-Kathrin Hoklas in Information, Communication & Society notes Bartmanski and Woodward's argument that the vinyl revival is not purely nostalgic and that it has occurred not despite digitization but partly because of it.
[9] Writing in the Association for Recorded Sound Collections annual journal, Edward Komara commended the authors for being "sturdy academics who know exactly when to leave the discussion of the musical aspects to the musicologists".
[10] The book's discussion of the physical manifestations of recorded media relates to Bartmanski's work on icons about which he had co-edited and authored a book in 2012 titled Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life[11] and his work on the nostalgic power of the physical symbols of superseded forms such as the vinyl record or the former communist regimes of eastern Europe as evidenced in the streetscapes of Berlin and Warsaw.