Vinyl record sales are still on the rise, it has been confirmed, following reports that claimed the US market was down 33 percent.
A number of news outlets were under the impression that sales had declined for the first time in 17 years since the vinyl revolution revived the medium once again. The data for such reports came from Billboard’s Market Watch weekly report, which automatically updates with data provided by the company Luminate. The company had recently changed how it gathers its data, leading to some confusion.
Discogs reached out to Luminate following such reports, and it now shares that Chris Muratore, director of partnerships at Luminate, confirms that the reported data was incorrect, and that vinyl sales are actually up by 6.2 percent. Billboard has since clarified this within its Market Watch report, and other news outlets have also updated their articles.
Luminate’s previous reporting process was in place for over 30 years, and involved “sampling independent stores to extrapolate sales of CDs, vinyl, and cassettes for the entire US marketplace.” Its new system was implemented on 29 December 2023, the first day of its 2024 calendar, and involves counting actual sales from independent stores in the entire US market, as per Discogs.
In Luminate’s mid-year report, the company stated: “While the new modelled methodology more accurately represents the independent retail market, we do not have comparable historical data to provide an accurate year-over-year trend. Therefore, independent retail physical sales are not included in our H1 2024 vs. H1 2023 US physical sales reporting.” To summarise, while Luminate now claims that vinyl sales are up 6.2 percent, this number does not include independent record stores from 2023 or 2024 to avoid an unfair comparison.
In other similar news, data shared at the end of 2023 by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) noted that the CD market had sustained its smallest annual decline in nearly a decade last year as it moved closer to plateauing. Nearly 11 million CDs were sold across the year, while sales of cassettes topped 100,000 units in a calendar year for the fourth consecutive year.
Further details on physical music sales for 2024 will likely come in over the next two months as the year comes to an end. MusicTech will bring you this data as soon as we have it.
