Revenue from vinyl records rose 17% last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
The figures contributed to another banner year for the music industry. Sales of recorded music rose 6% to a record $15.9 billion last year, the seventh straight year of growth, according to RIAA, with streaming continuing to be the biggest driver of the industry’s recent expansion.
Vinyl’s resurgence has been years in the making, fueled mainly in the U.S. by indie-rock fans convinced of LP’s superior sound quality and young people attracted to the nostalgia of playing records.
The consistent demand has turned record making into a largely artisanal industry, with some buyers asking for novelty LPs—multicolored, scented, glow-in-the-dark—that add to the cachet of owning vinyl.
Revenue from vinyl records rose 17% to over $1.2 billion last year, the 16th straight year of growth for the format and nearly double what it was two years ago. Vinyl albums accounted for 71% of physical format revenue, which includes items like CDs, cassettes and DVDs, and 7.7% of overall revenue, RIAA said.
CD revenue fell 18% last year to $483 million, RIAA said.
Vinyl’s resurgence is coinciding with continued growth in streaming, a category which includes Spotify Technology S.A., Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and others. Streaming, which includes paid subscriptions, ad-supported services and on-demand apps, among others, made up 84% of the industry’s revenue, RIAA said.
About 41 million vinyl albums were sold in 2022, RIAA said.
A recording booth in Spotify’s Los Angeles office.
The music industry started turning around in 2016, when growth from streaming services began to outweigh a long-running decline in CD sales amid rampant online piracy. Revenue from paid subscription services grew 8% to $10.2 billion in 2022, exceeding $10 billion annually for the first time, the report said.
On-demand music services grew to a yearly average of 92 million paid subscribers, compared with an average of 84 million in 2021, RIAA said.
Music revenue from advertising-supported services such as YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, and others grew at a slower pace than previous recent years, up 6% to $1.8 billion. Ad- supported services contributed 11% of total 2022 recorded-music revenue.
Revenue from on-demand digital downloads dropped 20% to $495 million, the report said. Revenue for both albums and single-track downloads dropped.
Digital downloads accounted for just 3% of U.S. recorded-music revenues in 2022, a steep slump from the peak of 43% of revenue in 2012, RIAA said.