Vinyl Sales Outpacing Digital Downloads

In our increasingly digital world, it’s hard to imagine a time when you had to run down to the record store and pick up a physical format before you could learn who TSwift broke up with this month.

A new report from CNET shows that vinyl/CD purchases now slightly outpace digital downloads, accounting for 12% of revenue for US music labels (compared to 11% for iTunes). Streaming services like Spotify, which held only 34% of the market in 2015, now dominates the market, accounting 75% of all revenue.

It wasn’t that long ago that digital downloads and streaming stood on equal footing. In 2015, downloads and streaming each accounted for about 34 percent of the music industry’s sales. But as streaming has shot up in popularity, the music industry’s overall fortunes have soared: Total sales have increased 40 percent in those three years that streaming has overtaken downloads.

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