Vinyl Sales Exceed Digital Sales For First Time

Vinyl Sales Exceed Digital Sales For First Time

The vinyl record comeback is going is going strong abroad. Sales of LPs and 45s are outpacing digital sales in the UK. In Britain, vinyl sales ($3.02 million) eclipsing digital music downloads ($2.6 million) for week 48 of this year.

The news came from Britain’s Entertainment Retailers Association, suggesting the surge could be due to the Christmas shopping season and a growing number of British retailers making shelf space for vinyl.

ERA chief Kim Bayley said in a statement, “This is yet further evidence of the ability of music fans to surprise us all.” “Few would have predicted that an album format, first invented in 1948 and based on stamping a groove into a piece of plastic, would now be outselling it in 2016,” the Independent reported. The trend back to vinyl is so promising, Amazon.com has gotten in on the act, announcing the launch of Amazon Vinyl Lounge for the purists.

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. Let’s see if the love for vinyl crosses this ocean to the U.S.

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