Vinyl Outselling CDs For First Time Since 1987

Above, some of my vinyl records. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Sales of vinyl records topped CDs for the first time in over 30 years.

This is not surprising to me, vinyl sounds much better than CDs in my opinion. Even though I do buy CD (mainly because my RV has a built-in CD player), I have bought several LPs and 45 rpm singles in recent years and kept all of my vinyl records that I purchased since the early 1960s. 

Back in the late 1960s on through the 1980s, I divided by purchases between cassette tapes and vinyl. For my car cassette players, I later started buying just vinyl and made cassette tape copies for my cars.

CBS News reported:

Vinyl records are back and more popular than ever. A new report found that vinyl record sales continued their more than decade-long growth in 2022, and for the first time in more than three decades, outsold CDs in the number of units. 

The report, published by the Recording Industry Association of America on Thursday, found that physical formats of music saw another year of overall growth in 2022, totaling $1.7 billion. Making up nearly three-quarters of that growth were vinyl records, which saw a 17% increase in revenues for $1.2 billion. This marked the product's 16th year of consecutive growth, RIAA said. 

It also marked the first time since 1987 that more vinyl records were sold than CDs, which saw a revenue decline of 18% in 2022. The group said that 41 million vinyl albums were sold last year, compared to 33 million CDs.

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