In its 18th year of celebrating independent record stores and vinyl music, Record Store Day continued to draw enthusiastic crowds the week of April 12. Here are the U.S. sales highlights as tracked by Luminate:
– Total of 1.2 million albums sold (just over 1 million are vinyl)
– Fifth consecutive year total exceeded 1 million albums
– Only 12 weeks over the past decade surpassed 1 million mark
But to fully understand the vinyl-buying audience, it’s necessary to look not just at how many people are participating in RSD but at their demographic composition as well.
Luminate Insights’ U.S. Music 360 survey data, which gauges consumer sentiment on a quarterly basis, provides a glimpse of how engaged different age groups are in RSD.
Among vinyl buyers — the segment of survey respondents who indicated they’d purchased vinyl in the past 12 months — 46% of all vinyl buyers between 13-17 years of age went to RSD and purchased a piece of vinyl in 2024, as did roughly 44% of all vinyl buyers between 25-44. And it was 32% of vinyl buyers overall who attended and purchased at RSD — a hefty portion that indicates just how strongly RSD resonates with its target audience.
That squares with what Luminate has tracked among vinyl buyers even beyond RSD, where younger demos have been showing more increasing interest than their older counterparts since 2023.
The young artists who top the list of most popular titles purchased on RSD — including Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams and Charli XCX — also reflect the increasingly young skew of the current marketplace among vinyl consumers.
This year there were 327 exclusive RSD titles that sold at least one or more copies during RSD week 2025. The sales data also showed that more than 100 of the exclusive RSD titles sold out over the weekend.
More than 553,000 RSD exclusive albums were purchased during RSD week at independent record stores, as well as 120,000 vinyl RSD exclusive singles. The combined 673,000 sales represent more than 75% of all units manufactured exclusively for RSD.
As we touched on in a different analysis of the vinyl-buying audience in a Tuesday Takeaway last November, Luminate’s Music 360 asks additional questions about the RSD audience that will reveal even more about this year’s participants when our next wave of data comes in next month.
