Why Vinyl Sales Are Going to Reach “Record Breaking” $1 Billion This Year

Vinyl. Records. LPs. Regardless of what you call them, there’s no question that the modern resurgence of this nostalgic medium is surprising everyone. Vinyl sales reached an incredible $13 million in 2016, marking the format’s highest revenue since 1991.

But why?

Records are extremely fragile, difficult to carry around and hold a very limited amount of music. When CDs came into the mainstream, the majority of consumers found it quite easy to give up their record players once they got used to the advantages of the new, digital format. No scratches, easy to transport, and able to store more music than LPs, while retaining audio at a higher quality than cassettes. However, audiophiles never stopped discussing the frequencies that were being lost from the original recordings during the digitalization process, and many continued to prefer vinyl for its superior ability to reproduce music exactly as it was intended to be heard by the artists, producers, and record labels. Still, for the majority of music fans, the missing frequencies in the CD format were completely unnoticeable, based in part on the fact that people typically listen to music on relatively low-quality speakers or headphones that aren’t able to comprehensively reproduce sound in any circumstance.

As the music industry and the rest of our society increasingly moved to digital mediums over the following years, vinyl became largely relegated to the bargain bins at the back of independent record stores, and very few artists were releasing their albums as LPs. But, as is often the case, an increasing number of people started yearning for tangible music mediums once they were less commonplace, and vinyl began an upward trend that shows no signs of slowing down. It is now at the point where the world’s most popular artists are releasing music on vinyl, including Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, and many others.

Clearly, vinyl is cool again, and more people are embracing this once-outdated format now than have in the past 25 or so years. In fact, it was recently reported that Sony Music Entertainment is opening a plant in Japan to produce vinyl records for the first time in 30 years, amidst projections that 40 million records will be sold in 2017, resulting in sales that will reach almost $1 billion. Ed Sheeran’s third album has already sold 31,000 copies on vinyl since its release in March, and while many reissues are also selling well, there are a lot of fresh tracks that are finding fans on vinyl, such as Arcade Fire’s Everything Now and Thinking of a place by War On Drugs.

While the popularity of streaming services continues to grow, vinyl appears to be steadily shifting from existing as an extremely niche market to becoming mainstream again. With projected sales of $1 billion this year, it’s expected that a growing number of both major label and independent artists will be releasing albums and singles on vinyl for the foreseeable future. Maybe it’s time to dust off that turntable needle?

By Sergey Bludov,
SVP, Media & Entertainment at DataArt