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Vinyl and Streaming Sales Offset CD Decline in UK Music Sales

posted by janrinok on Thursday January 05 2017, @02:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the where-did-I-put-that-Dansette-record-player? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found that vinyl music is not dead and forgotten, but is actually becoming popular again as witnessed by the following story:

Vinyl sales, which reached a 25-year high, and a continued increase in streaming offset decline in CD sales as music consumption rose last year, according to official music industry figures.

Vinyl sales rose by 53 per cent to top 3.2 million units – the most LPs sold since 1991. The biggest-selling vinyl artist was David Bowie, whose untimely death spurred interest in his back catalogue. Amy Winehouse's Back To Black also did well for similar reasons.

Just over 200,000 LPs were purchased in 2007. The 16-fold increase since underlines the strength of the vinyl revival.

Sales of CDs declined 11.7 per cent or more than a tenth in 2016.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @04:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @04:41AM (#449655)

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/12/07/vinyl-surpasses-digital-sales-in-some-music-markets-time-to-ask-santa-for-a-turntable [washingtonpost.com]

    From December 7, 2016

    Vinyl sales have been growing by 10 percent a year, but they still occupy a niche. For the first half of 2016, vinyl sales were $207 million, or about 6 percent of the $3.4 billion in revenue for the U.S. recording music industry. Digital downloads for singles and albums during the same period were more than $1 billion. Streaming accounted for nearly half the revenue during the first half of this year.

    Like many other businesses — newspapers, film, retail stores, travel, television — the economics of recording industry has been transformed by the digital age. At its peak in 1999-2000, the U.S. record industry earned just shy of $15 billion. It’s about half that now, although the first half of 2016 saw total sales tick upward by 8 percent, according to the RIAA.

    ...

    “A lot of people come in in groups and buy a record or two, and are clearly going back to listen to it together,” he said. “The act of buying a record is social. And there are people able to ask us or their friends about the record and talk about it and look at the tracks.”

    Norton said the highest quality vinyl records sound better than digital music, and his customers are willing to pay more for that, especially customers who listen to jazz. Friedlander sees the phenomenon in more textural terms. Vinyl’s revival, he said, “shows people love music and the ability to hold something tangible in a digital world.”

    I inherited my 90 year old uncle's Lynn turntable ($1000+) with moving magnet cartridge -- does that automatically make me a hipster? I like the Lynn because it isolates the bounce in my floor. I suspect an old AR turntable would very soft suspension would do about the same. A Technics turntable in the same location caused subsonic feedback, the woofer cones were visibly flapping.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @04:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05 2017, @04:57AM (#449659)

    “A lot of people come in in groups and buy a record or two, and are clearly going back to listen to it together,” he said. “The act of buying a record is social.

    Uh oh. Antisocial ACs triggered.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Unixnut on Thursday January 05 2017, @10:12AM

    by Unixnut (5779) on Thursday January 05 2017, @10:12AM (#449716)

    > Norton said the highest quality vinyl records sound better than digital music,

    Most peoples idea of "digital music" is 56kbit/s AAC, so it would not surprise me that Vinyl sounds better, very little could sound worse to be honest. We have regressed a lot in audio quality. There used to be competition to see who could get the better quality consumer audio, it peaked with the CD, which was good for 95% of people out there.

    They tried to extend it with consumer DAT and later SACD, but apart from audiophiles, it didn't really catch on. Since then there has been a push towards convenience over quality, allowing people to pack more music into portable players, and now a push towards ever more compressed lossy codecs in order to keep streaming costs down for the streaming company.

    Now I guess the pendulum is swinging back, and people are rediscovering audio quality. Perhaps once they discover Vinyl, they will find out that CD's exist, and have even better quality.

    Wouldn't kill the record companies to stop dynamically compressing CDs to the point of stupidity. I tend to buy 90's vintage CD releases, because that is before they went mental with the Dynamic compression. At the time CD players were still expensive pieces of kit, and people would enjoy them for the audio quality. Hence the CDs were properly mastered.