In news that’ll surely make your dad and that guy Tony who works in the basement record shop happy, it’s been announced that vinyl record sales will increase next year by more than 25%.
At a NARM presentation last week in Los Angeles, Nielsen SoundScan debuted a really well-made and entertaining series of slides that showed the continued growth of the best physical music format and illustrated that vinyl will never die, you digital bastards!
However, 25% may sound like a lot (and for vinyl it is) but the total sales increase for LPs will still only amount to 1.6% of total music sales, which is a pretty paltry amount in a day and age when iTunes makes billions of dollars a year. However, old guys with a serious addiction to collecting and organizing and nerdy teenagers who’d rather listen to music in their bedrooms than go to a club or have sex make up a pretty large part of the American population, so just you wait, vinyl may someday make up 5% or maybe even 6% of total sales, and when that happens, you’ll be sorry you threw all your needles away.
