D2C Newsletter
Vinyl Sales:
Can We Make the Switch to E-Commerce?
Roni Schlanger
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What Are The Key Take Aways?
Vinyl sales are going to be growing online
Creatives make a big difference
There’s for sure a clientele to target with for vinyl sales
Guardians of the Galaxy was the top selling vinyl of 2017 which is disturbing
Soundtrack vinyls could be a new stream for us to go after
Follow up with clients about D2C (especially rock) for vinyl push
Great for retargeting post tours - keep line of communication open with events team
Last week, research conducted by ICM for the BBC revealed that 45% of people who bought an album on vinyl had listened to it before online. While many news platforms ran with the equally unsurprising news that half of record buyers didn’t play their records in the first month (more on this later), the news reinforces an almost wilful naivety about the way vinyl is treated in relation to digital media.
At the root of this there may be some romantic notion that to buy records you need to go to your local record shop and spend a good while listening through the week’s new 7″s and LPs before making your purchase, but with over a quarter of all physical music purchases in the UK made via Amazon, this clearly is no longer a reality. Independent record shops may be on the up, but they still only make up 7% of all vinyl sales in the UK.
Sales of vinyl in 2016 reached a 25-year high as consumers young and old have once again embraced physical formats of music.
More than 3.2m LPs were sold last year, a rise of 53% on last year and the highest number since 1991 when Simply Red’s Stars was the best selling album. This was also the first year that spending on vinyl outstripped that spent on digital downloads.
The deaths of some music world giants was a key driver in vinyl sales, as people invested in records as a mementos. After David Bowie’s death he became the bestselling vinyl artist of 2016, with five albums posthumously featuring in the top 30.
While vinyl sales still only account for 5% of the albums market, they are becoming increasingly important sources of income for record labels and musicians.
Vinyl records are projected to sell 40 million units in 2017, with sales nearing the $1 billion benchmark for the first time this millennium. This impressive milestone has been untouched since the peak of the industry in the 1980s. While explosive by today’s standards, according to Deloitte, in its heyday (‘81), total vinyl album sales surpassed 1 billion units in just that year alone.
Many of today’s consumers just want to own something that they can hold in their hands. The 12 x 12 artwork is another massive draw. Spalding continues, “You can go into a record store, buy the first Velvet Underground record and bring home a Warhol!”
That said, according to Nielsen, vinyl LP sales climbed by 9 percent last year to a record-high 14.3 million albums. That pace of growth was down from previous years’ double-digit gains, leading some to declare an end to the vinyl boom. But a newer data tracker, BuzzAngle Music, tabulated vinyl sales as up by 20 percent—but only totalling 8.6 million. (The two services have slightly different methodologies and have at times conflicted.) Meanwhile, both eBay and online vinyl marketplace Discogs showed double-digit vinyl gains as well. Elsewhere, vinyl sales soared 27 percent in the UK and 22 percent in Canada. If there’s a downturn looming, it’s not here yet.
In 2017, vinyl sales in the U.S. rose for the 12th straight year, according to Nielsen Music. What the latest gains mean has spurred some discussion, though: In an era of data overload, when streaming analytics can break down a song’s popularity to the most minute detail, vinyl metrics can still be pretty murky. Who’s truly tallying up what we buy at some grimy venue’s merch table? Plus, fledgling one-person labels typically don’t report their sales to data trackers.
