While many in our industry focus on streaming consumption and the billions of streams that occur weekly, there is another consumption format that has shown growth year after year for the last 18 years straight: vinyl album sales. In fact, vinyl album sales growth began long before streaming even emerged as a way to consume music.
Since 2016, vinyl album sales have increased from 13.1 million to 49.6 million in 2023, a growth of nearly 300% over the last eight years. The total number of vinyl albums purchased since 2016 is 224.9 million. So which strata had the biggest impact over that time span, accounting for 45% of all vinyl sales and equaling more than 100 million sales total?
That would be independent record stores.
With Black Friday Record Store Day approaching in a couple of weeks, we can report on the current impact that independent record stores are making in 2024. Since June, when a new modeling methodology was implemented, indie stores have accounted for 40% of all vinyl album sales and 29% of all physical sales. In both cases, this marks the largest strata when measuring where consumers have gone to purchase vinyl.
While the impact of the indie stores has not changed, the people shopping for vinyl at said stores over the years have. The average vinyl music buyer continues to skew younger. We recently added two new questions to our Luminate Insights Music 360 survey to determine where consumers purchased their vinyl albums over the past 12 months as well as who had gone to an indie record store to celebrate Record Store Day this past April.
37% of all vinyl buyers in the past 12 months purchased a vinyl album at an independent record store, which was the response with the highest percentage. The age breakdown of indie store buyers showed that 24% of consumers were 24 years old or younger and 41% were under 35 years old. However, the age segment with the largest number of indie store buyers was that of consumers between the ages of 35-44 years old, with 20%.
When looking at who attended Record Store Day, 33% of all consumers who had purchased vinyl over the previous 12 months also went to an indie store on April 20. Looking at the age breakdown of who participated in this annual indie store shopping event, 46% of those consumers were under the age of 35, 27% were under 25 years of age and 16% were between the ages of 13 and 17 years old.
Source:
Luminate Music Consumption Data
Luminate Insights U.S. M360 Q3 2024
