Please watch the video above for the full review
In the UK vinyl sales have been their highest for 30 years (5 million) and even cassettes have sold around 200,000.
Yet again the CD struggles to get any coverage apart from saying they only sold 14 million! CD sales have declined but at the lowest levels for years.
There has been so much clickbait and weighted coverage on this subject that I felt again I wanted to give a balanced view. ALL physical music formats are valid and many music fans buy both CDs and vinyl. The media can try as much as they like to say the CD is dead but just like the fact that vinyl never really went away the CD is always going to be around as it still has a lot of fans.
Streaming has the biggest part of the pie but the BPI’s report suggests that “more often than not”, having an album available on physical formats plays a pivotal role in artists being able to achieve No.1 albums in the Official Albums Chart.
Speaking about the importance of physical music, Drew Hill, MD Proper Music Distribution, said: “It’s been an incredible year for CDs, vinyl and cassettes as they continued to drive albums up the charts. This year, nearly 90% of unique No.1 albums hit the top spot off the back of a physical sales majority,
To date in 2021, in 40 of the 52 weeks of the year the album that topped the Charts did so thanks to combined CD, vinyl and cassette purchases accounting for over half the album’s consumption in the week that it got to No.1
Phil Aston
Now Spinning Magazine
