Saturday, January 10, 2009

Mini-renaissance for vinyl


"Amid otherwise gloomy music sales numbers released by Nielsen Co. [for 2008], vinyl record sales doubled compared with the year before," Canwest News Service's Grant Surridge reports:

http://www.vancouversun.com/Entertainment/Vinyl+record+sales+double+2008/1142874/story.html

Surridge quotes Roy Trakin, editor of the music website Hits, as saying, "[S]trangely enough, it's the younger generation that are really kind of going back to [vinyl]" as "a nostalgic throwback to listening to music in a traditional way." I doubt that this is a mass movement; not long ago, I had to explain to a 20-something what records are and how they work.

Record sales numbers were miniscule compared with other formats – 1.88 million records sold in the U.S. in 2008, vs. 361 million CDs and 66 million digital albums.

The article doesn't say so, but I presume the Nielsen data don't include sales of used records.