For the first time since the distant year 2004, CD sales have grown in the United States. In Spain, this same trend began in 2019, when the physical market grew by a considerable 7.2%, precisely thanks to the CD and also to the vinyls. Since then both formats have not stopped growing.
And it’s not that one format is growing in favor of another, it’s that the music industry is growing like it was two decades ago. Paid streaming is still king in revenuebut combined sales of CDs and vinyl are posting gains not seen since the 1990s.
The resurgence of physical formats was not an accident
In 2018 the sale of CDs and singles continued to fall in Spain, the physical market in general fell by up to 13.93% compared to 2017. There, the only weirdo It was vinyl, which although at that time it represented only 5% of the total industry, had been rising a lot since 2017.
But, it is not necessary to go very far to see how things begin to change drastically in the following years. In 2019 we had new numbers from Promusicae revealing that the CD grew 9.7% in 2018, the first time this format had risen since 2014. This trend continued, which meant that by 2020, the industry would have grown by 22%, a true milestone that came hand in hand with the enormous growth of vinyl.
It is only necessary to take a look at the Radiography of the recorded music market in Spain between 2020 and 2021 to discover how sales have grown more than 22% between one year and another. Audio and video streaming represent the biggest slice, vinyl already generates sales very close to CD, but in general, all three formats are growing. The only one that goes down is that of digital downloads.
Streaming, CDs and vinyl together and upwards. People consume more music than ever and are willing to pay for it, as long as it is not for downloads
It is an uphill trend that extends to more parts of the world. This is what the most recent numbers published by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) show, with the milestone that CD sales have grown for the first time in almost 20 years. That, together with the consistent rise in vinyl sales that in the US alone reached 39.7 million units, represents more than 1,000 million dollars in revenue for the music industry.
Not only that, the CD/Vinyl combination represents the first physical market combined rise since 1996. Paid subscriptions to services such as Spotify or Apple Music continue to account for almost 60% of earningswhile views maintained by advertisements follow in second place.
It is obvious that streaming is not going anywhere, but today’s consumers, with greater access than ever in history to music catalogs of millions of songs within reach of a click, are betting again on physical formats to a range that continues to grow consistently. It’s as if all that access favors the industry…the same one that said in the early days of Napster that the Internet was going to kill them.