Did you know that vinyl sales generate more money than free music services by YouTube, Spotify and Vevo combined? I found the report to be surprising. Even more surprising, it isn’t just by a little.
Vinyl record sales have earned $222 million dollars in the first half of this year. Ad-based services only generated $163 million dollars in just the first 6 months of 2015. It is an incredible difference and vinyl sales make up one third of total music sales.
In the first half of 2014, the ad-based sites generated $128 million dollars. So these sites did see a big spike in a year. But so did vinyl records. Compared to last year, their sales are up 52 percent.
Not only are vinyl sales up, but CD sales are down. In fact, there is no other music format that is surging as much as vinyl records. When it comes to purchasing physical music, buyers like large images and collections. Another bonus when it comes to buying these records is the exclusive content some of them offer. Many of them even come with a free digital download. Artists have noticed the soar in vinyl sales so some of them are releasing colored records and special singles on vinyl records.
Of course paid streaming services continue to bring in the most money. These services have a lot of paid subscribers and not as many users who use the ad-based services. In the first half of this year, paid streaming services generated over a billion dollars. That isn’t even for the full year of 2015. All sales of physical recordings have only brought in $748 million dollars so for this year.
Paid steaming services will probably continue to dominate music, but it looks like vinyl records aren’t going anywhere any time soon. It doesn’t seem like the vinyl record thing is just a phase. It has always continued to generate a lot of money and each year it brings in even more.