As retail powerhouses such as Wal-Mart and Amazon begin to carry vinyl on their websites, the market seems to be showing signs of confidence in the ancient format.
Soundscan reports 2.2 million units of vinyl sold this year, already above 2008’s figure, with the holiday shopping season ahead. Last year’s vinyl sales — more than 2 million units — were the most since Nielsen SoundScan started tracking them in 1991.
It’s still a small figure compared with album sales in digital format, which stand at about 69 million units year-to-date. But nonetheless, LP sales are growing just when disks were supposed to be disappearing.
“Vinyl business in the last four years went from 15% to 60% of our business,” says Matthew Wishnow, president and founder of leading vinyl sales company InSound.com, which needed bigger offices to house its LPs.?
Pete Lyman, co-owner of Infrasonic Sound Recording and a full service mastering engineer who prepares masters for pressing onto vinyl, says LP sales are “saving the album as a format. And I think (vinyl) will soon be the only tangible form of music delivery.”
InSound.com, says Wishnow, approached the labels about offering a legal download with a vinyl LP. “With that option, purchasing becomes a no-brainer for consumers,” he says. “We noticed a huge increase in catalog titles when we paired them with MP3 downloads.”
By selling MP3 with an LP, InSound.com appealed to three demographics: the impulsive download buyer, the music-snob collector, and the young hipster — and got all of them to actually buy music on disks.
There’s certainly an assumed “cool factor” that’s come with the recent vinyl trend. That’s unavoidable. Personally, I started buying the format because the albums I wanted didn’t exist on CD. Plus, used records are often fairly cheap.
As for new albums released on vinyl, I can’t afford them. Label exploit vinyl’s current popularity by overpricing. That’s ridiculous. It will be some time before CDs become obsolete, but I certainly foresee the dominance of the digital and vinyl formats. I just think a band’s new album should cost the same on iTunes as well as on vinyl.
