Please watch the video above for the full news update
CD Sales see a Mini Boom in the UK and climb in the USA – Vinyl sales see huge growth. Q2 Stats
As you know Now Spinning Magazine is all about celebrating physical music. I also take a keen interest in how all physical formats from vinyl, CD and cassette are doing with regards to actual sales. This video looks at CD and vinyl sales in the UK and USA.
As you can imagine vinyl sales are doing incredibly well but what you might not expect is that CDs also saw growth of over 26.6% in the UK in Q2 2021. (in the USA CD sales grew by 2.2%)
In fact, a stat that many record company execs might have not predicted is that physical albums sales outperformed streaming growth for the first time with an uplift of 34% against 10% for streaming.
Vinyl sales in the UK grew by nearly 60% to 1,271,699. But the other thing that I think is fascinating is we are seeing a mini-CD boom in sales, CD sales rose by 26.6% to 3,151,130 which is the first increase in CD sales in years.
In the USA streaming grew by 15%, so 5% More than the UK but vinyl sales grew by 108% pushing sales to 19.2 million albums up from 9.2 million. CD sales have also stabilised and grew by 2.2%, to 18 point 9 million CDs sold,
There are now a lot more younger people starting to buy physical albums as well!
If you find this video interesting please let me know in the comments and I will make it a regular update.
Phil Aston | Now Spinning Magazine
I am in that minority that still buys CDs and even Cassettes. Why? There are few reasons. One is that MP3 format is by far not the best quality. The storage for MP3 is not reliable. Either it is a hard drive of some sort (NAS or PC/Mac) or a Cloud. In case of former the drive can (had has) failed taking the entire collection with it. The latter cost money every month/year. MP3 does not come with a cool booklet and can be easily lost. This has happened to me. The other reason is that streaming services do not have everything. For instance iTunes/Apple music does not have quite a few albums that I like. Black Sabbath – Headless Cross is not on it, Judas Priest – Jugulator is not on it, some albums of WASP are nowhere to be found and the list goes on and on. Also the album can disappear from the streaming service if the artist/label decide to not extend the hosting for the next year. The digital music means virtual player (Apple CarPlay/iPhone) the interface is very convenient if you have a large library. Thus I prefer to have large my physical collection and a true Hi-Fi audio system. I hope more people will wake up to the joy of the physical media.