Music Metrics Show Increased Consumption of Catalogs

Luminate Data released last week in its 2022 Year End Music Report, a summary of the past year in music consumption, demographics, and other data. Although much of the report focuses on demographic data oriented towards advertising and brand partnerships, it contains a few buried gold nuggets that suggest that the album portion of the music market is returning to the state it was in decades ago: vinyl LPs.

Luminate (formerly Nielsen Music and then briefly MRC Data) has published year-end reports for the past few years. These have become one of a small group of landmark music industry barometers, along with the RIAA’s Music Revenue Reports, IFPI’s Global Music Report, and Edison Research’s Infinite Dial study.

Forbes reports Luminate’s data measures music consumption (streams, sales volumes, radio airplay) rather than revenue. Many of the statistics that the 2022 report shows are in line with what industry watchers have expected to see: continued growth in streaming music consumption; growth in video streams (YouTube, TikTok) outpacing growth in audio streams (Spotify, Apple Music); megastars like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Bad Bunny taking increasingly disproportionate shares of listenership.

But the numbers also tell a hidden story about music albums and vinyl: namely that while the album is continuing its slow decline as a popular music release package, it’s also increasingly finding itself back where it came from: in vinyl LPs. The album as we know it today originated in its 20-minute-per-side configuration in the late 1940s; the data shows it going back to its roots after decades of variations, experimentation, and digitalization.

This chart from Luminate’s report shows that total album sales continue to drop—they decreased 8.2% since 2021. But album sales are split across four formats: digital downloads, CDs, vinyl LPs, and cassettes. Not counting the latter, which are a rounding error on total sales, all categories of album sales are dropping except vinyl. 

Although vinyl sales growth is slowing down, vinyl now represents 43% of all album sales. Vinyl already represents more than half (54%) of physical album sales, and digital album sales are continuing to plummet. It’s likely that at least half of all album sales will be on vinyl by next year. 

Luminate’s data also shows that vinyl is helping to boost sales of older “catalog” music, which is increasing overall in proportion to current material. Of the ten top-selling albums of 2022 across all formats, two are catalog titles: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (returning to the charts after more than 40 years thanks to Nathan Apodaca’s viral TikTok video in late 2020) and Michael Jackson’s perennial favorite Thriller. But on vinyl, in addition to those two titles, Taylor Swift’s 2020 release folklore sits at no. 7, and the Beatles’ immortal Abbey Road occupies the no. 10 slot. And the top-selling album of 2022, Taylor Swift’s Midnights, sold 52% on vinyl—945,000 copies, almost enough to go Platinum on vinyl sales alone.