“It was six of the top 10 selling vinyl albums last year that were pop albums, but those six albums were responsible for one-third of all pop albums,” Krien says. On the other hand, the average pop fan may only buy a couple of releases in a year, but those are the albums that crowd the top 10. Rock still commands most of the vinyl market, but pop has had the biggest recent growth, per Luminate Courtesy Luminate One thing that is clear is that rock fans buy more vinyl units than any other type of fan, by far, but it’s spread out among releases that don’t become blockbusters.
If there’s a problem with diversity in the vinyl world, it may lie more with Latin music, which is seeing phenomenal streaming increases at present but had a barely perceptible 0/1% market share gain in vinyl last year. The combined R&B/hip-hop segment of the vinyl marketplace is actually ahead of pop, still, with a 17.4% share, second only to rock. Vinyl is not just a lily-white phenomenon, either, as the big sales for Lamar last year and Tyler this year would indicate.
Rock releases still make up just over half the pie. And yet that doesn’t mean that rock actually lost any sales, just that other formats were crowding in a bit. The share that rock enjoys was down by 4.1%. The biggest gains by genre have been for pop, which increased its share of the overall pie by 2.4% last year, and country, which upped its share by 1.1%. “But put that alongside the vinyl story,” Krien adds, “where we see vinyl’s current growth not only be really significant, but even outpace its catalog growth, and that, I think, is a really significant story.” So with less new material to stream, obviously that activity has to go somewhere. In reviewing the Billboard top 200 chart, I remember having to go through 20, 25 new releases on that chart every week, and now, the number of new releases is anywhere between 5-15. I think that was largely due to a gradual decline in higher-impacting new releases we’ve seen since the pandemic. However, what was so significant about this past year was that current activity actually declined, particularly around audio streaming. “Just inherently due to our definition of catalog being anything older than 18 months, that universe is always going to increase at a faster rate than the current universe. Krien has a fairly philosophical explanation for that.
Luminate counts Billie Eilish as an alternative artist, but most probably would probably feel comfortable seeing her labeled as pop, so throw her in with the other current superstars and that’s seven out of the vinyl top 10 - leaving catalog albums by the Beatles, Prince and Kendrick Lamar as the oldies-but-goodies outliers that might once have been assumed to be the format’s bread-and-butter.Ĭurrent-release growth significantly outpaced catalog growth for vinyl, defying the trend in all other formats, per Luminate Courtesy Luminate The trend toward increased pop sales for vinyl was already well evident at the end of 2021, when Luminate released a list of the year’s top sellers and noted that six out of 10 were from pop artists - Swift (who had three of the top 10), Styles, Rodrigo and Adele. And that time frame predated the release of the new Styles and Tyler, the Creator LPs that are creating their own turbo boost. That’s less explosive, but hardly the sound of a bubble bursting. The growth this year has been a little slower: Krien says the figures for 2022 were up 4% over 2021 when he ran them after Record Store Day in April. Krien spoke about a study that Luminate put together on vinyl trends at the Music Biz conference in Nashville earlier this month, and Variety asked him to expound further on the company’s findings.Īs was already established at the end of 2021, the vinyl format experienced an astonishing 52% increase last year, on top of a 12% rise that had been experienced the year before that. Tuesday, it was announced that Harry Styles’ “Harry’s House” had broken the record for vinyl sales in a single week - and more than that, it’d done that in just its first three days out, with LP sales of more than 146,000 just in the first weekend. The preeminence of pop in the vinyl format isn’t about to end any time soon. 1 based almost entirely on a vinyl release - “it was just nice to see some increased diversity from a genre perspective over the past year.” But with big surges for pop and country of late - not to mention the recent development of Tyler, the Creator’s album returning to No. “Rock still controls the vinyl universe,” concedes Peter Krien, senior music analyst at Luminate.
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