Are vinyl records here to stay?

Is the vinyl revival back for good? This is the billion question in our days and the answer is YES. Read and discover why we are so sure about that…

– Sony Will Start Pressing Vinyl Records After 28-Year Hiatus (CNN Money)

Sony Music Entertainment said the last week it will begin pressing vinyl records again, ending an almost three-decade hiatus.

A dramatic increase in demand for vinyl music in recent years prompted the move, a Sony spokeswoman said. Interest is coming from younger customers who have never used records before as well as older fans, she added.

– The ‘New’ Billion Dollar Music Business (Forbes)

Vinyl records are projected to sell 40 million units in 2017, with sales nearing the $1 billion benchmark for the first time this millennium. This impressive milestone has been untouched since the peak of the industry in the 1980s. While explosive by today’s standards, according to Deloitte, in its heyday (‘81), total vinyl album sales surpassed 1 billion units in just that year alone.

According to Deloitte, new vinyl records and revenue will enjoy a seventh consecutive year of double-digit growth in 2017. But the slice of the pie is still a very small one – with broader music industry revenues projected to be approximately $15 billion this year, vinyl will account for only 6%.

– Vinyl surpasses digital sales in some music markets (The Washington Post)

Last year, the first week of December, for the first time in Britain history, the amount of money spent on vinyl records in the UK overtook that spent on digital downloads.

Vinyl sales hit $3.02 million the mentioned week compared with the $2.6 million made from digital music purchases, further proof that record shopping has gone mainstream.

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 the last year.

– Continuous growth (Nielsen)

For the first time in over a decade, physical albums actually became a larger share of total album sales than they were in the prior year.

Vinyl LP sales grew to over 11% of total physical album sales in 2016. This marks 11 years of year-over-year increases for vinyl LPs, reaching a record sales level in the Nielsen Music era (since 1991) with over 13 million sales this year.