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Dang! People Bought A Ton Of Vinyl Albums In 2014

According to a recent post on Vox.com, vinyl made a killer comeback in 2014. Last year, music fans bought 9.2 million albums, which is the highest number since companies started tracking sales with Neilsen Soundscan date in 1993.

Oddly enough, those 9.2 million LPs only made up 6-percent of the album sales last year, but the number is still impressive any way you slice it. Compared to 2013, vinyl sales grew 52 percent, which isn’t something to sneeze at. Just check out this handy-dandy bar graph!

vinyl-sales-in-2014

Whether you consider yourself an audiophile or not, we think it’s pretty boss that people are still collecting vinyl, which means they’re still buying music, regardless of the format.

So what were the biggest selling albums of the year? Let’s take a look, shall we.

Top Selling Vinyl Albums Of 2014 (through Nov. 2 according to The Wall Street Journal)

1. Jack White‘s Lazaretto (75,700 copies sold)
2. Arctic MonkeysAM (40,600 copies sold)
3. The Black KeysTurn Blue (28,300 copies sold)
4. Lana Del Rey‘s Born To Die (27,200 copies sold)
5. Beck‘s Morning Phase (25,200 copies sold)

With this upward momentum, are sales expected to continue growing in 2015? Good question.

Many producers, like United Record Pressing in Nashville, Tennessee, are adding presses to keep up with demand, but the machinery costs beaucoup bucks and the production process takes time. After all, pressing machines produce only 125 records an hour.

Some critics—like Ryan Raffaelli, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School—chock up this vinyl boost to something called “technology re-emergence,” and say it could be more of a cyclical trend than overall reinvention.

In other words, only time will tell whether this classic medium is truly the future of music.

Do you think vinyl’s newfound popularity is temporary or built to last? Tell us what you think.

[H/T: Wall Street Journal]

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Comments

  1. Trevour says:

    What is up with that timeline along the bottom? Mix n’ match, kids!

  2. Claire says:

    hey–I just thought that you would like to know that the final number of record sales for Lazaretto was 86,707! (In the US–worldwide it was over 150,000) I love the article though and hopefully the numbers will rise a lot next year, too!!! Vinyl is the greatest!!!