Vinyl record sales ended a 17-year upward skyrocket in 2022, and there’s plenty of blame to go around for it.
The vinyl record revival counts among the music industry’s more interesting recent trends, and it’s one that has allowed for Gen Zers and Millennials to find common ground with older generations through a shared admiration for a somewhat outmoded tech format.
But after years of meteoric growth – 17 consecutive years, to be precise – sales of vinyl records in the U.S. have stalled. That news comes via Billboard, which, citing data in the U.S. 2022 Luminate Year-End Music Report, notes that vinyl sales in 2022 rose a mere 4.2% over the previous year.
When you compare that figure to sales numbers for the prior two years, with 46.2% and 51.4% year-over-year increases in 2020 and 2021, respectively, it’s clear that the vinyl record revival has not just hit the brakes, but skidded off the track. How this impacts future sales of the best turntables is unclear, but another data point from the Luminate report indicates playback hardware isn’t even at issue since 50% of consumers who had bought vinyl over the previous 12 months don’t even own a record player.
Turntable owners, a group I belong to, might find the idea of buying vinyl just for show and not play confounding. But what’s really going on behind the scenes here is sheer fan frenzy for collectibles that bring them closer to their favorite artists – Taylor Swift, for instance.
Vinyl numbers in 2022 actually would have been much worse if not for the release of Swift’s Midnights, the year’s top LP with 945,000 copies sold. According to Billboard, Midnights is the highest selling vinyl record since Luminate started tracking sales for the category back in 1991. Not only that, but her album Folklore was the number seven best-selling record in 2022, and her full catalog generated 1.
