Vinyls enjoyed a 'revival' last year by outselling CD's for the first time since 1987. Last year the antique music-playing format saw a bump in sales of up to 11%.
According to figures released by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) £150.5m worth of vinyl albums were sold in 2022 while only £124m worth of CDs were sold showing a 17.4% decrease for the format. Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, Richard Farnell, 53, co-owner of the Vinyl Exchange in Manchester says the rise in sales has been partly down to the rise of a growing trend and says the biggest sellers for them have been the oldies.
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He said: "We've noticed a shift back towards vinyl and there's a few reasons for that. Firstly it's become kind of more trendy again over the last few years, CD's have become less desirable.
"We still do sell a lot of those and they are a good format, but I think there are less people buying CD players new. We've got a real mix of genres here, still a lot of the popular old artists like Beatles, Led Zeppellin, Fleetwood Mac all those rock things from the past, they're still very popular and there's a lot of reissues of those and originals can go for quite a lot of money now."
Music sales as a whole grew by 3% last year with the main driver being streaming services such as Spotify, YouTube, Amazon and Apple. Harry Styles had a strong year with both the year's biggest-selling album in Harry's House as well as the biggest-selling and streaming single with 'As It Was'.
According to the ERA the value of the home entertainment market soared to £11.1bn last year. The figure heralds an all-time record for music, video and games sales.
Speaking about the vinyl resurgence, ERA CEO Kim Bayley said: “We are approaching a watershed. Thanks to the investment and ingenuity of streaming services on the one hand and to the physical retailers who have driven the vinyl revival on the other, music is within sight of exceeding £2bn in retail sales value for the first time in more than two decades.
"Music has to be great to win people’s attention, but it’s the buying and consumption experience which ultimately persuades people to put their hands in their pockets.”
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The main driver of growth continues to be streaming and digital formats which reached £10.1 bn up 8.4% on 2021. The fastest growing sector in 2022 was video, up 14.4% to £4,432m, followed by music, up 3.0% to £1,987m and games up 2.3% to £4,664m.
Games continues to represent the largest sector of sales, accounting for 42.1% of the total, with video within touching distance on 40.0% and music on 17.9%.
The leading titles for games was FIFA 23, for video it was Top Gun Maverick which stars global superstar Tom Cruise and Harry’s House by Harry Styles for music.
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