Reading and listening the triumphant but ultimately shallow posts about the "comeback of vinyl records" has turned my stomach in knots and now it's inside out. This is nothing to celebrate and if you read the very statistics you're posting with a critical eye, you'd file this one not under WOOT but WTF.
Yes, Soundscan (which, incidentally, is a verifiably awful metric of music sales but which everyone in the big industry adores, because yes it's the 21st century and they really can't build a better mousetrap after all of these years) reports that sales of LPs rose 33% in 2009.
And if you stop there, that's fucking awesome. Go vinyl. The audiophiles, for once, are winning.
But you shouldn't stop there, because the same source (Soundscan - in fact, it's in the very same press release that generated all these positive stories) puts the total number of vinyl LPs sold at just 2.5 million records.
Two point five million. If you add up all of the vinyl sold in 2009, there were 2.5 million copies sold.
For the sake of comparison, what do 2.5 million records mean? How much money does it generate and signify?
I'm glad you asked.
There were considerably fewer vinyl records sold than the total number of albums (about 4.6 million) sold by Taylor Swift in the last year alone.
It's slightly less than the 2.7 million albums suave opera singer Andrea Bocelli sold in 2009.
It's slightly less than the 3.1 million records that reality TV creation Susan Boyle sold in 2009.
It's slightly more records than the 2.25 million CDs the remastered Beatles catalog sold in two weeks in September 2009.
It's slightly more than the 2.3 million Michael Jackson CDs sold in the 3 weeks after his death last June, but considerably less than the 8.3 million records from his catalog sold for the year.
In terms of the music industry (rather than an individual artist), 2.5 million copies is a rounding error. It's nothing. It's insignificant.
And those 2.5 million vinyl records are not from one artist, or one genre, or even one industry wanker-created category like "dance" or "pop". It's 2.5 million vinyl records total, covering everything from Front 242 to Danny Tenaglia to Michael Jackson and Prince and the Strawberry Fucking Alarm Clock put together.
In fact, the best selling vinyl recording artist of 2009 was Radiohead, with just under 48,000 LPs sold. Let's do this Nigerian email scammer style: fourty-eight thousand copies sold. That's not a Gold record, much less platnium. If the industry gave awards for sales so low, it'd be something like Cigarette Foil.
This is the 2nd straight year that Radiohead topped all vinyl album sales. That in itself is revealing of the market for these things. Radiohead is giving away digital copies of their music, and selling LPs basically to the diehard fan and collector markets. Prior to these "premium" vinyl releases being marketed by the band, most fans were probably unaware that vinyl editions of their favorite artist's music were even being pressed.
In fact, Amazon's 2nd bestselling rock vinyl record at this very moment is Radiohead's 2008 release In Rainbows - and In Rainbows sold all of 11,400 copies in 2009, according to the very same Soundscan press release that I've been quoting. That's the #2 bestseller at a major retailer, in a popular genre, by an insanely popular artist. (#1 is a reissue of Abbey Road. Good luck arguing that one.)
Vinyl is not becoming more popular: it's simply being marketed better to the very small minority willing to buy them. As I've mentioned before, I'd be thrilled if everyone pressed vinyl for everything because it sounds better than digital files, but self-delusion doesn't make a very good business model. If you're a vinyl lover, these numbers aren't worth cheering for. They're worth crying over.
