Number of the Day
How Vinyl Finally Beat CDs in 2020, by the Numbers
Hipsters’ favorite format outsold CDs for the first time in decades
$232.1 million: That’s the total U.S. sales of vinyl records in the first half of 2020, which topped CD sales for the first time since the 1980s, according to CNN.
While the vinyl record once seemed destined for oblivion, it has proven surprisingly resilient. Nielsen/MRC Data’s mid-year report notes that vinyl sales have been growing for years. They’re up about 4% in 2020 — remarkable given shoppers’ limited access to physical record stores due to the pandemic. (The biggest seller in vinyl has been Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? at 85,000 records.) By contrast, CD sales have plunged 48%, to around $129.9 million.
Surely this represents vindication for a certain strain of audio snobs, nostalgists, and hipsters. But it’s not quite a comeback: Vinyl sales are dwarfed by streaming revenue, which continued to climb through the lockdown era, growing 12% to about $4.8 billion. (Drake has been the most-streamed artist of the year, with more than 3 billion streams in the first half of 2020.) And the vinyl format is still a long way from its 1978 peak, when the combined sales of vinyl singles and albums hit $2.73 billion.
Can nostalgia for compact discs be far behind?
