RIAA – Vinyl Outsold Plastic in 2022
All Image Credit: RIAA
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have just released (March 9th), it’s 2022 year end report on music sales.
The RIAA has confirmed that LP’s outsold CD’s in 2022 by physical unit count. This is the first time since 1987 that vinyl LP’s have returned to the top of the sales charts in the physical format realm.
The RIAA report for 2022 titled,“Year-End 2022 RIAA Revenue Statistics”, shows that revenues from physical music formats have continued to climb in 2022 after their resurgence in 2021, with total revenues rising by 4% or $67 million. Revenues from vinyl grew 17% to $1.2 billion and accounted for 71% of physical format revenues.
This is the first time in 35 years that vinyl sales have outsold CD sales, with vinyl selling 41 million LPs versus 33 million CDs.
Overall recorded physical media music revenues have continued to grow for seven consecutive years now hitting $15.9 billion in 2022, with physical music media accounting for 11% of the total revenue generated by music sales.
However, it comes as no surprise, as can be seen in the above pie chart, that streaming continued to be the biggest area of growth. With record levels of participation in paid subscriptions, ongoing growth in ad-supported format revenues and increased contributions from new platforms and services. At wholesale value, total music revenues grew 5% and exceeded $10 billion for the first time ever.
As a life long vinyl enthusiast it is very gratifying to see vinyl’s growth, despite my on-going concerns over pressing quality.
Finally, I just wonder how low plastic CD sales will have to go before the major record labels start to consider it too small a niche market to support?
Here is the full report: Year-End 2022 RIAA Revenue Statistics.
For my earlier RIAA posts click here.
Check out this post for more on Vinyl Composition and Chemistry.
