Seeing this headline a lot in the last 24 hours. It’s not exactly true, although people want it to be true.

What is true is that the last ten years has seen a vinyl resurrection, which is nice, and CDs have fallen. But let’s look at the fine print!

The headline comes from an @RIAA report of music sales in the first half of 2020 vs 2019. Here’s the three page summary...

https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Mid-Year-2020-RIAA-Revenue-Statistics.pdf

Here’s the core bit of stats. What are the numbers?

In Jan-June 2020, 10.2million CDs were sold versus 8.8m vinyl records. So more CDs were sold than vinyl. Granted only 1.4m more (16% difference), but still more.

What’s striking is comparing to 2019: 18.6m CDs to 8.6m vinyl, a 10m/116% difference between formats a year ago

CD sales collapsed by nearly half (45%)in the first six months of 2020 due to the pandemic, while vinyl sales were static (up 2.3%).

I can think of two reasons for that:

(1) Perhaps many CD purchases remain in-person/in-store, because consumers are making casual purchases or just haven’t made the leap to to non-physical music, and the stores were closed, so the CDs didn’t sell.

(2) That leaves the vinyl consumers are the “serious” music fans who would still want to buy music in a pandemic, and would maintain buying vinyl by mail order.

The missing bit of data is what’s bought in-store/in-person and what’s bought mail order/Amazon.

So what’s with the headlines, well, it’s the unit price.

Vinyl is 46% of physical sales, but generates 62% of the physical profits. So, “Vinyl Outsells CD”.

The price of CDs is continually being pushed down and vinyl pushed up...

Do some maths and you’ll see that vinyl costs more to buy, so it’s getting pushed as a preferred format, just like CDs were 30 years ago!

But look at the difference between the sales cost of a CD versus vinyl. Last year an LP was 99.5% more the cost of a CD...now it’s 107%

But the real issue is that physical media, CDs & vinyl combined, only account for 6.6% of total revenues. It’s all digital, people, and most of digital is streaming:

6.6% Physical
6.2% Digital Permanent (MP3, etc)
87.2% Digital streaming

That means 87.2% of the money spent on music in the first half of 2020 in America, was spent by people who will never actually own the music. From a business point of you, it’s kind of brilliant, keep people paying! But, it might not be good for the soul…

For reference, as to how the music business has collapsed this century, the biggest selling US album of 1999, sold more copies on its own (11.4m) that all the CDs sold in the country for the first six months of 2020 (10.2m)