Vinyl record sales surpass CDs bought for first time in 30 years

MORE vinyl records than CDs are sold in Spain nowadays – something not seen since 1991 when the former was falling out of fashion and the latter still a luxury to many.

True to the notion that, if you keep anything for long enough, it becomes all the rage again, a report by Promusicae reveals that the old-time 12” and 7” turntable discs are now at their most popular in over 30 years.

In fact, they make up well over half – about 54% - of the market for non-digital music, or sounds with a physical 'support'.

Sales of vinyl totalled €13.6 million, increasing by 25.6%, in the first half of 2022 – and, nowadays, they carry a very high price tag in recognition of their 'vintage' nature.

Overall, sales of recorded music – physical supports such as CDs, records and cassettes, and also digital supports, such as downloads or subscriptions to platforms – totalled €191.5m between January and June 2022 inclusive, rising by 12.4% on the previous six months. 

Digital, or intangible formats are still the most common among consumers, but vinyl is seeing a massive comeback: Around 1.6 million old-style records were bought in Spain in 2021, a market worth around €25m.

Back then, sales of these earliest music supports had already risen by 32% on the previous year's figures.

Rewinding barely a decade, fewer than 140,000 vinyls were sold in Spain in the year 2013 – but they were still making the transition from 'out of date' to 'retro gems', as the end of their heyday was still too recent for them to be sought-after goods among anyone but serious collectors.

By the early 1990s, singles released were beginning to be retailed in cassette format rather than 7” vinyl, with these already having gradually overtaken 12” albums in the previous 20 years or so; common practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s was to buy 7” singles where these were cheaper, and then record them onto blank tapes.

The ease with which vinyls could become scratched and cease to play properly, and the fact that they could not be used in a car stereo, meant cassette tapes became mainstream.

Indeed, 'old' vinyl records were routinely destroyed by DJs in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the sound of their rhythmic and deliberate scratching on a turntable became almost de rigueur in hip-hop, electronic and techno music.

CDs and CD players, a novelty in the mid-1980s, remained expensive, and were still considered a luxury by many until the late 1990s.

Favoured over cassette tapes due to their indestructible nature – a tape getting 'chewed up' by its player or tangling up meant an album was no more, unless it was still on the bestseller shelves, since online shopping had not been invented yet – CDs had more or less replaced all other types of music support by the turn of the Millennium.

A brief experiment with 'mini-discs' in the 1990s fell flat almost before it started.

The past 10 to 15 years has seen music downloads become the main purchasing format, although physical supports are still widely retailed – practically always in CD format, except in specialist record stores.

CDs are still being sold – in fact, 4.4 million were bought in Spain in 2021 – but their decline has been dramatic; Promusicae says exactly 20 years earlier, the annual CD sales figures were closer to 79 million.

Sales of CDs fell again in 2022, by around 20.8%, to €11.1m, or about 44% of the total 'tangible' record-buying market.

At an average price of about €10 to €12, depending upon popularity and recency of the artist or album, this means only around a million CDs would have been bought in Spain this year so far.

In fact, anyone living in a countryside location in Spain might have seen more CDs hanging from trees than in shops: Farmers use these to keep insects and animals away from their fruit crop, as they reflect the sun and blind them.

'Intangible' music sales have risen continually, though: Promusicae says 2022 say growth of 14.6%, totalling €166.5m.

But with the 'digital music age' came illegal downloads and other forms of piracy, which has long posed a threat to the industry.

Along with the loss of sales income to producers and royalties to artists through piracy, soaring costs of primary materials for making physical music supports, coupled with much higher distribution charges, are also having a negative impact on the industry's future, Promusicae warns.

Still, downloads or streaming platforms make up 87% of turnover in the recorded music sector – compared with 85% in 2021.

Streaming accounts for 81.2%, having increased by 15.2% in just one year – largely through either subscriber platforms or free ones financed by adverts.

Of the latter, about 17.1% of music listened to is via YouTube videos, also financed through advertising and accounting for about €28.5m in sales.

Surprisingly, in Spain, only 1.7% of the digital music market comes from 'permanent' downloads of singles, albums and videos, such as via iTunes or similar, and this figure includes those downloaded as mobile phone ringtones.

Yet, across the board, the recorded music market is shrinking – having started to show real recovery since it fell into crisis about 20 years ago, largely fuelled by piracy, this stability is beginning to reverse.

Promusicae chairman Antonio Guiasola says the digital music market showed 30% growth in 2019, but the pandemic years led to a major drop – to 19% growth in 2020 and 20% in 2021.