Vinyl sales are trending up. that in 2023, , the second year this was true. The difference is even more staggering when you look at revenue: Vinyl sales that year earned.
$1.4 billion, which is 71 percent of physical sales overall. Customers paying for downloads of songs, meanwhile, accounted for $434 million, less than a third of vinyl.
Put simply: Vinyl is the most popular way to buy music. Now, to be clear, the revenue from all sales combined is insignificant compared to streaming, which pulled in $14.4 billion in 2023 (84 percent of record industry revenue).
People overwhelmingly prefer to rent music than to buy it. Even so, I find the rise of vinyl fascinating. A growing number of people are willing to pay more for a less convenient way to listen to music.
You can’t listen to records in your car, for example, and lugging them on a plane trip is going to be annoying. So why are people buying records at all? I’ve written about why and , and I think these arguments all hold. Put simply, it is nice to own something instead of merely renting it from a streaming service.
But why records over CDs? You might expect me to talk here about the improved sound quality of vinyl over streaming and CDs, and a certain kind of journalist would do that. And, to be clear, lots of people prefer the sound of vinyl, but I couldn’t find any clear research that shows it’s clearly superior. People are broadly aware that streaming, while convenient, isn’t a great way to support artists.
.