Vinyl Sales Up – Is Vinyl Going Mainstream?
Record geeks rarely need a reason to feel smug, but vinyl hoarders worldwide had reassuring news the other week as Nielsen SoundScan released figures predicting that sales of proper, old-fashioned albums will top 2.8m by the end of 2009. This will mean an increase of almost 1m on last year and the highest annual figure for vinyl sales since SoundScan began tracking them in 1991.
Like we reported back in June the vinyl revival just continue growing stronger, Nielsen Soundscan reports that year-to-date vinyl record sales topped two million units last week, breaking the previous record of 1.9 million units last year. At the same point in time last year, SoundScan had tracked 1.5 million sales of vinyl records.
That’s a pretty impressive 37% year over year improvement and the Guardian Music Blog have been looking into the figures trying to figure out why vinyl record sales are soaring again, and while we earlier have written about the vinyl record as social object and a “distinction machine” becoming the preferred format for the underground, the niches and the edges, they point out that
while it’s true that record sales count for less than 1% of overall music consumption, what’s interesting is that buying vinyl is no longer the preserve of 12-inch mad DJs – the biggest growth area for vinyl is actually in country music, a genre not normally associated with the extended DJ Headcrab remix.
For them the “main event is happening away from specialist shops and right in the middle of the road – where record companies are selling the public albums they’ve already bought.”
What do you think? Is vinyl going mainstream?
Tags: vinyl records, vinyl revival, Vinyl Sales
