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Vinyl Sales Top CD's

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If supply and demand is what drives the market, that means CD's are going to get even cheaper. In the mid 80's CD's were 3X the cost of a record, now records are usually twice what a CD cost.
Using the inflation calculator records have increased in cost but not by a large percentage. Using the same calculator a CD should cost a tad over $40 now.
 
IIRC, my nearest local record shop is now only selling CDs via special orders/online. I only see stuff on vinyl or cassette when I go in, and the CD section disappeared to make room for more vinyl.

I know for sure they no longer accept them for trade-in credit or cash. Maybe there's an exception for a valuable rarity? I'd imagine that's about it these days.

Interesting times we live in!
 
To be clear, CD sales in units still topped vinyl. But of course both of them are quite small relative to streaming. Digital rules, regardless of our preferences.
 
I walked into Walmart last week and saw that they had a relatively large selection of vinyl albums. I haven't seen that in about 35 years.
 
CDs were more popular than vinyl in terms of units sold in 2020, however: RIAA data shows that 31.6 million CD albums were sold in the year, with 22.9 million vinyl LP/EPs being snapped up.
 
As others have said, CDs still sold far more units. It's just that new vinyl is ludicrously expensive, which is why, dollar-wise, it raked in more money this past year.

Both formats are absolutely pathetic in numbers when compared to streaming.
 
Yeah, I prefer having the physical medium over streaming. To be frank, I have never streamed anything except on my phone for convenience though I could hook my phone to my system I suppose
 
To put things in perspective, in the UK in 2020:

. . . . . 157,000 cassette tapes sold
. . . . 4,800,000 vinyl records sold
. . .. 16,000,000 CDs sold
. 139,000,000,000 songs delivered by online streaming
​
 
Northwinds said:
Yeah, I prefer having the physical medium over streaming. To be frank, I have never streamed anything except on my phone for convenience though I could hook my phone to my system I suppose
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I used to feel the same. Then I bought a nice streamer and a lossless/hi-rez subscription. I still buy the physical media once I've decided the whole album is good enough to justify it.

On a related note, I still rip my CDs to a hard drive. The streamer can access those, too. Quite convenient, and the SQ is excellent.
 
botrytis said:
It goes up and down. It is no big deal. The next thing will be cassettes, which are having resurgence.

To me, it is about supporting the musicians. None of the formats, streaming, vinyl, or CD's, etc. really support them, it supports the record labels.

That is why I like Bandcamp, the money goes directly to the artist.
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Right now, cassettes remind me of where vinyl was at in the mid to late 2000s - in the early stages of a revival, where the sales numbers were starting to trend upwards amid a sense of renewed interest.

While that's mostly true (about the record labels), streaming royalties are especially poor for the artists compared to physical sales. Many independent artists (i.e - not on a major label/of mainstream popularity) make more money from a handful of physical sales than quite a high number of streams. This is what I've been told both by artists and people running small labels.

Of course, touring, merch, and other revenue streams are still where most of an artist's income comes from. And yes, Bandcamp is a great way to support the artists!
 
johnjhazel said:
LOL. Really.
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As someone who collects cassettes, it's largely the novelty/fun factor. But perhaps the one "logical" reason I might choose a tape over a CD is for more rare titles (think stuff that's unavailable for streaming) that can be had cheap on tape ($5 or less sealed NOS in many cases for me) but goes for $50-100+ on CD or vinyl if you can find a copy, depending on condition.

What can I say? I like collecting obscurities - but don't always wanna pony up, lol.
 
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