Vinyl
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In 2022, for the second year in a row — and only the second year since Luminate began tracking music sales in 1991 — vinyl albums outsold CD albums in the U.S. Vinyl continues to be the leading format for album purchases for the second straight year, according to figures announced in the U.S. 2022 Luminate Year-End Music Report.
Vinyl was the dominant format for album purchases in the U.S. up until the early 1980s. After that, cassettes took hold until the early 1990s, when the CD format blossomed and remained king until 2021.
Further, vinyl album sales grew for a 17th consecutive year in the U.S., with Taylor Swift’s Midnights ruling as the top-selling vinyl LP in 2022. It sold 945,000 copies last year — the largest yearly sales total for a vinyl album since Luminate began tracking sales in 1991.
Growth for the format is slowing, though. Following a 51.4% year-over-year increase in vinyl album sales in 2021 and a 46.2% year-over-year increase in 2020, sales in 2022 rose just 4.2% over the year. Whether that’s due to slowing demand or supply issues that more pressing plants could help alleviate — it marks a significant deceleration following a pandemic-fueled period of rapid expansion.
17 YEARS OF VINYL GROWTH: 43.46 million vinyl albums were sold in 2022 (up 4.2% from 41.72 million in 2021). 2022 was the 17th consecutive year vinyl album sales grew in the U.S., and the largest year for vinyl album sales since Luminate began tracking data in 1991. Plus, vinyl LP sales posted their single-largest sales week of the Luminate era when 2.232 million vinyl albums were sold in the week ending Dec. 22.
43% OF ALL ALBUMS SOLD WERE VINYL LPS: Vinyl album sales comprised 43.4% of all album purchases in the U.S. in 2022 (43.46 million of 100.09 million total sales across all formats — both digital and physical). Vinyl LPs accounted for 54.4% of all physical albums sold last year (43.46 million of 79.89 million; physical albums include CDs, vinyl LPs, cassette tapes and other niche physical formats). Both sums are Luminate-era records for vinyl’s share of the album sales market in the U.S.
In 2022 there were a total of 88 albums that sold at least 50,000 copies on vinyl — up from 87 in 2021. To compare, only 56 albums in the CD format sold at least 50,000 copies in 2022 (down from 67 in 2021).
ONLY HALF OF U.S. VINYL BUYERS OWN A RECORD PLAYER: While vinyl album sales continue to gain each year in the U.S., only half of those fans buying records actually own a vinyl record player, according to a research survey commissioned by Luminate. Last September, the firm published the statistic as part of its U.S. Music 360 2022 – Wave 2 report. Of those respondents over the age of 13 who had purchased vinyl in the previous 12 months, there was a question asked about which devices they owned, and only 50% said they owned a record player. Total respondents for the Music 360 study: 3,992.
NEARLY HALF OF ALL VINYL ALBUMS WERE SOLD AT INDIE STORES: in 2022, 48% of all vinyl albums sold in the U.S. were purchased at independent record stores (20.92 million of 43.46 million). The second-largest seller of vinyl LPs in 2022 was Luminate’s category of Internet/mail order/venue, which accounted for 32.8% of the market (14.26 million of 43.46 million). Sales included in the Internet/mail order/venue category include those generated by mail-order websites like Amazon, Target.com and Walmart.com, official artist web stores and merchandise stands at concert venues. In third place was the mass merchant category, which includes in-store sales at stores like Target and Walmart. The segment had 13.6% of vinyl album sales in 2022 (5.90 million of 43.46 million).
ROCK RULES: Among Luminate’s core music genres measured, rock music accounted for a leading 51.83% of all vinyl albums sold in 2022 (22.52 million of 43.46 million). That’s essentially the same volume as in 2021 when rock accounted for 51.78% of all vinyl albums sold (21.60 million of 41.72 million). The second-biggest genre for vinyl album sales in 2022 — and in 2021 — was R&B/hip-hop, which accounted for 17.59% of the market last year (7.65 million of 43.46 million). In 2021, R&B/hip-hop held 17.38% (7.25 million of 41.72 million). R&B/hip-hop is an umbrella genre that includes most R&B and/or rap albums.
‘MIDNIGHTS’ IS MASSIVE: The top-selling vinyl album of 2022 is Swift’s Midnights, with 945,000 copies sold across all of its vinyl variants and editions (see top 10 list, below). Midnights has the largest yearly sales total for a vinyl album since Luminate began tracking sales in 1991. The set also posted the single-largest sales week for a vinyl LP in Luminate history, when it launched with 575,000 copies in its first week.
TOP 10 SELLING VINYL ALBUMS OF 2022 IN U.S.1. Taylor Swift, Midnights (945,000)2. Harry Styles, Harry’s House (480,000)3. Olivia Rodrigo, Sour (263,000)4. Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city (254,000)5. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours (243,000)6. Tyler, the Creator, Call Me If You Get Lost (211,000)7. Taylor Swift, Folklore (174,000)8. Tyler, the Creator, Igor (172,000)9. Michael Jackson, Thriller (168,000)10. The Beatles, Abbey Road (160,000)Source: Luminate, for the tracking period Dec. 31, 2021, through Dec. 29, 2022.
Eight of the year-end top 10-selling vinyl albums saw their sales enhanced by their availability across multiple variants (including assorted color-vinyl editions). Among the top 10 vinyl sellers, only Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost (No. 6) and Igor (No. 8) were available in one iteration each.
Midnights, for example, was available in four vinyl LP editions, each with a different cover and colored vinyl (dubbed Moonstone Blue Edition, Jade Green Edition, Mahogany Edition and Blood Moon Edition). Target stores also carried an exclusive colored-vinyl Lavender Edition. To further enhance sales, Swift’s official web store sold signed copies of the four standard vinyl LPs during a pre-order window before the album launched. As previously reported when the album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, some superfans may have been motivated to purchase all four vinyl variants, as the back covers of the albums fit together like a puzzle to display a clock face (a literal reference to Midnights). Swift shared the news through her social media in mid-September, saying: “If you put all the back covers together, she’s a clock. It’s a clock… It makes a clock.” (Swift’s official web store previously sold hardware to hold the four CDs or the four vinyl LPs together as a wall clock.)
SWIFT IS QUEEN OF VINYL: Swift sold the most vinyl albums among all acts in 2022 in the U.S., with 1.695 million sold across her entire catalog of albums. (She sold more vinyl LPs last year than the next two biggest sellers on vinyl combined: Harry Styles with 719,000 and The Beatles with 553,000.) Swift loomed so large on vinyl in 2022 that one of every 25 vinyl LPs sold last year in the U.S. was a Swift album (1.695 million of 43.46 million).
Swift has six of the year’s top 40-selling vinyl albums — Midnights (No. 1; 945,000), Folklore (No. 7; 174,000), Red (Taylor’s Version) (No. 11; 153,000), Evermore (No. 14; 134,000), Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (No. 30; 97,000) and Lover (No. 36; 91,000). Styles and Kendrick Lamar have the second-most titles among the year’s top 40-selling vinyl LPs, with three each.
Luminate began tracking music sales in 1991 when the company was known as SoundScan. Luminate’s sales, streaming and airplay data is used to compile Billboard’s weekly charts. Luminate’s 2022 tracking year ran from Dec. 31, 2021, through Dec. 29, 2022. Luminate is an independently operated company owned by PME TopCo, a PMC subsidiary and joint venture between Penske Media Corporation and Eldridge. Billboard is an independently operated company owned by PME Holdings, a subsidiary of PME TopCo.
The new Paul McCartney box set includes more than 50 years of singles – 65 re-creations of previous 7-inch releases and 15 new ones, plus a book – in a wood crate that comes with straps to make it easier to lift. Have silly love songs ever weighed so much? It’s the ultimate way to preserve, and sell, a music format that was originally intended to be disposable.
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All told, The 7” Singles Box makes a solid case for McCartney as the auteur of the three-minute pop song. In The Beatles, McCartney helped remake the album as an ambitious art form – but he remains devoted enough to singles to keep a jukebox in his London office. By some measures, he’s the most successful singles artist of all time: The Beatles are No. 1 on Billboard’s ranking of the top-charting Hot 100 acts of all time and McCartney is No. 13 as a solo artist (including his work with Wings). When it came out, “Mull of Kintyre” was the best-selling single in U.K. history – and it may not even be one of the dozen best songs here.
Appropriately for its focus on singles, this set offers a refreshingly warts-and-all picture of McCartney’s post-Beatles career. (McCartney owns the rights to his solo recordings, so the decision was his, and it’s a good one.) At a time when most of his ’60s and ’70s peers are editing their legacies, McCartney includes everything, from the sublime (“Band on the Run,” “My Brave Face,” a live version of “Maybe I’m Amazed” and much more) to the silly (“Ode to a Koala Bear;” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reggae,” the bass-heavy B-side of “Wonderful Christmastime”).
Courtesy Photo
The dig against McCartney is that he often didn’t live up to his genius, but maybe he just wasn’t always in the mood. Part of the point of Wings was that making music in the shadow of The Beatles was freighted by the kind of expectations that make it hard to make great pop singles. John Lennon and George Harrison both began their solo careers making music that was arguably more adventurous, but both of them also eventually got back to basics. McCartney certainly wasn’t afraid to be ambitious: One of these singles, previously unreleased as such, features the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Another is “We All Stand Together,” from the movie Rupert and the Frog Song. You get the sense that he got a kick out of both of them. So will many listeners.
More than any other major artist, McCartney proved that pop music could be both artistically ambitious and awfully silly – sometimes even both at once – and succeed on its own terms either way. Not all of these songs were received well when they were released, but many deserve another listen – especially as singles. So does the music McCartney continues to make. As big as this box is, “it doesn’t include my latest single,” McCartney writes in the foreword, “because I haven’t written that one yet.”
For over a decade, Taylor Swift has been offering fans a multitude of options when it comes to purchasing her albums across physical formats with exclusive editions available through a longstanding partnership with Target. But with her new album, Midnights, out Friday (Oct. 20), she’s truly outdone herself.
There are over 20 different versions of the album available on CD, LP and cassette in various colors, with different cover artwork, censored and uncensored, with and without autographs. That plethora of options is great for fans who may want a different version than their friends, or who — as many seem to — feel driven to collect them all. It’s also great for Swift, who’s earning more money from increased sales that will impact her performance on the Billboard charts and likely add up to one of the year’s best album debut weeks.
Few artists, if any, attract as much attention as Swift does for her promotion and sales strategy, thanks largely to her close relationship with her fans. In turn, she is brilliant at developing physical goods they want to buy, in addition to just streaming her music. Last year, following the release of her re-recordings of Fearless and Red, she accounted for one out of every 50 albums sold in the U.S., according to Luminate. She knows Swifties are collectors, and is now providing not only the multiple Midnights versions but elaborate containers to put them in, like a $39 CD clock or vinyl clock for $49, which display the four albums in a timely format, or $79 faux-leather vinyl collector’s case.
In today’s streaming-centric music industry, physical albums have become collectible tokens of fandom, and artists have been responding to growing demand. BTS and other K-pop megastars regularly rack up huge numbers by selling CDs and LPs with different colors and exclusive postcards and photos sold as collectible items, with the music as a secondary benefit. When South Korean boy band Stray Kids’ MAXIDENT topped the most recent Billboard 200 chart for the week of Oct. 22, it did so with 10 CD versions, including autographed CDs and exclusive Barnes & Noble and Target releases. Increasingly, it’s becoming a mainstream strategy for acts in the U.S., too. Such disparate acts as Denzel Curry and Slipknot have recently released various physical versions of their new albums as well. It just so happens that these sales all count towards an album’s Billboard chart performances. So by offering four different versions of Midnights per format, Swift is at least quadrupling her revenue from some super fans, as well as their impact on the charts.
Based on Billboard‘s research, here is a full rundown of the different Midnights versions fans can buy:
CDs:Moonstone BlueBlood MoonMahoganyJade Green
Signed CDs:Moonstone Blue (Webstore Exclusive)Blood Moon (Webstore Exclusive)Mahogany (Webstore Exclusive)Jade Green (Webstore Exclusive)
Clean-version CDs:Moonstone BlueBlood MoonMahoganyJade Green
Vinyl LPs:Moonstone BlueBlood MoonMahoganyJade Green
Signed Vinyl LPs:Moonstone Blue (Webstore Exclusive)Blood Moon (Webstore Exclusive)Mahogany (Webstore Exclusive)Jade Green (Webstore Exclusive)
Cassettes:Moonstone Blue
Target Exclusives:Lavender Deluxe CD (With Three Bonus Tracks)Lavender Vinyl LP
Digital:Moonstone Blue (Webstore Exclusive)Moonstone Blue (Clean) (Webstore Exclusive)Standard – 13 TracksStandard – 13 Tracks (Clean)Standard – 14 TracksStandard – 14 Tracks (Clean)
For the record… We’re hiring!” reads the lawn sign in front of Nashville’s United Record Pressing, the largest vinyl pressing plant in the United States. With an expansion underway that will bring in 48 new presses — upping the manufacturer’s count to nearly 100 and more than doubling its total output from approximately 40,000 to over 100,000 units of vinyl per day — the need to staff up is crucial. And URP isn’t the only Tennessee plant on the prowl.
As the vinyl boom continues — the format generated $570 million in revenue through June 2022 (up 22% year over year), according to the Mid-Year 2022 RIAA Music Revenue Report — pressing plants around the world are not only striving to keep up with demand but planning how to get ahead of it. Tennessee is aiming to take the lead, increasing its number of plants from two to five in 2022 and planting a flag as the U.S. vinyl hub. The state offers advantages in distribution, in taxes and, most notably, in culture.
“All music resonates from Tennessee,” says Brandon Seavers, CEO of Memphis Record Pressing (MRP), which was founded in 2014 and is undergoing its own $30 million expansion. “We really take pride in our musical heritage.”
“We’ve got wine country in California,” adds Drake Coker, CEO of Nashville Record Pressing, one of three new manufacturers that have come online in the past year in Music City. “Tennessee is going to be vinyl country.”
The growth in Tennessee’s vinyl production capacity is substantial. MRP — owned by Czech Republic-based GZ Media, the world’s largest vinyl record manufacturer — is adding 33,000 square feet to house 36 new presses to be up and running by early 2023; NRP, also owned by GZ Media, opened in June. Physical Music Products, a smaller plant with three presses currently online (and five more expected by early 2023) that was founded by Nashville-based mastering engineer Piper Payne, opened in March, and The Vinyl Lab, a music venue and boutique two-press plant, has been operational since April 2021.
“Nashville is exploding right now,” says URP CEO Mark Michaels. He cites everything from “attractive” economics and state tax rates to the presence of tech giants like Amazon and Oracle as drivers for the city’s growth.
And, as Coker points out, an estimated 75% of the U.S. population lives within a 24-hour drive of Nashville, making it what he calls “a distribution heaven.” (Nashville and Memphis are centrally located to two of the country’s major distributors in Franklin, Ind., and La Vergne, Tenn.)
It’s not just proximity to distributors that makes Nashville and Memphis ideal cities to house a pressing plant. The Vinyl Lab founder Scott Lemasters believes it’s about proximity to everything. “The components that you need to make a record: the mastering houses and studios, the people who cut the lacquers. There’s even a plating facility in town. Everything is within a 10-minute radius,” he says. “Half our jobs are just running around town.”
But not everything can be done locally, and surely not everything can be sourced locally. So how did so many plants within one state manage to break ground on expansions or entirely new facilities all at once — and during a global supply-chain shortage?
Michaels believes URP, which was founded in 1949, had a bit of luck on its side. After the plant relocated to its current, larger facility in 2017, Michaels never thought it would need to further expand. “And then, as we saw 2020 and the growth of vinyl, it created an incredible acceleration and demand,” he says. “All of our customers were just crying for capacity.” By the top of 2021, URP decided to grow its operations yet again — fortuitous timing, with Michaels noting that supply-chain challenges got much worse soon after.
It’s something Seavers can attest to as well. At the start of 2021, MRP booked three-and-a-half months of work in five weeks. “It was more than a flood,” he says. “It strained every system that we had.” With the financial support of GZ Media, MRP added another 36 presses to its facility for a total of 52, which will eventually boost its vinyl units per day from 36,000 to 130,000. “Having GZ behind it all really has been key,” says Seavers.
The hustle to get GZ-backed sister plant NRP operational is further proof of how essential that kind of backing can be for a plant at any stage and of any size. For decades, GZ has been building a family of plants across North America, including Precision Record Pressing in Ontario. It was that plant’s president, Shawn Johnson, who approached Coker about relocating to Nashville to head up the newest sibling. Coker arrived in fall 2021, secured a space for NRP by December (because of Nashville’s current growth, he says commercial real estate was hard to come by) and started construction and operations in March. He compares the process to a plane leaving the runway as it’s still being built.
Capital and technological support from GZ have allowed that plane to take off, fueled by already existing customer relationships. “Every record that we can make in the next four years is already presold,” Coker says. “Who gets to start a company and not worry about sales?”
The Vinyl Lab — a multifunctional space that includes a pressing plant and a venue that will open in October — has enjoyed a similar safety net from the start. Scott first conceived the idea for The Vinyl Lab in 2015 and, after a series of setbacks, leased its space in January 2020. The following December, the Grand Ole Opry called. The Opry had continued holding shows in an empty hall during the pandemic, recording each one and eventually choosing 12 performances to release as an album — which it wanted on vinyl. “They called us, and we were like, ‘Our machine is not even in its final resting spot yet,’ ” he recalls with a laugh, noting he secured the company’s first Phoenix Alpha press in 2019. “We were fully transparent with [the Opry]. That order was due on June 3, and we delivered it on June 2.”
Lemasters, who operates The Vinyl Lab alongside Clint Elliott and Heather Gray, says their orders have mostly been word-of-mouth (in addition to ads they posted in bathroom stalls). He praises both the city and the vinyl community as a whole for the eagerness to help one another, recalling the time Jack White and Ben Blackwell of Third Man Records referred Dualtone Records to The Vinyl Lab, which led to a steady flow of work early on.
“That’s what’s great about the industry right now, is that we are still in a very collaborative phase,” says Seavers. “We would never be where we are if we hadn’t had that.”