Category: Compact Discs

Vinyl Album Sales Surpass Music CDs in 2021

1 Out of Every 3 Albums Sold in the US in 2021 Were Vinyl LPs – (paywall)

Indie retailers sold almost half of all vinyl LPs, while Taylor Swift was the format’s top-selling artist — accounting for 2.6% of total sales.

Vinyl Records Reach Highest Sales Numbers In Last 30 Years

In 2021, vinyl albums constituted more than 25% of physical album sales in the UK.

Driven by Adele, vinyl and CD sales both went up in 2021, data says 

January 11, 2022

Streaming has been dominating the music industry for years now, but 2021 saw a notable rise in sales of physical albums, thanks in part to the success of Adele’s latest album.

Both CDs and vinyl experienced high sales in 2021, according to an annual year-end music data report from MRC Data, released this week.

….”In recent years, I notice customers preferring to physically own music, other than streaming, usually in its best form (vinyl),” said Tobago Benito, owner of record store DBS Sounds, in MRC’s data roundup.

He attributes that rise both to the inclusion of record players in movies and television, but also to the joy people get from digging for a certain vinyl in a record store, one that may “bring back wonderful memories,” he said.

The rise in vinyl sales is also a significant jump from just one year ago, in 2020, when vinyls made up 27.5 million of physical music sales, about 40% of all total sales. To now make up just about half of total sales is significant.

…But one surprise from last year was the uptick in CD sales in the U.S., which went up by 1.1% — from 40.2 million sales in 2020 to 40.6 million in 2021. CD sales have been in steady decline for years, so the fact that they did not actively decline last year could be significant.

One reason for the bump in sales was the release of Adele’s “30” and Taylor Swift’s “Red (Taylor’s Version).”

The Target CD version of “30,” which contained three bonus tracks, helped the CD version of the album sell 378,000 copies in its first week — the biggest CD sales week of 2021, MRC said. Just a week prior, “Red (Taylor’s Version)” sold 146,700 copies.

The Official Top 40 best-selling vinyl albums and singles of 2021

The top vinyl list includes popular releases by Lana Del Rey, Adele and ABBA.

Vinyl outsold CDs in the US for the first time in decades – (paywall)

Vinyl Earns Biggest Sales Week Since 1991

by Brad Callas, Dec. 29, 2021

Vinyl just had its best sales week in three decades.

Americans bought 2.11 million copies of vinyl records in the week ending on Dec. 23, marking the biggest sales week for vinyls since MRC Data began tracking music sales back in 1991, Billboard reports. It’s a 45% increase from the week prior (1.46 million), suggesting the spike can be attributed to the holiday shopping season.

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