Physical sales are recording heavy losses overall.
© Unsplash / Stelios Kazazis
This is a result that no one had seen coming and a first since 1986. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the inter-professional association which defends the interests of the recording industry in the United States, released its first half music industry sales report. It turns out that vinyl overtook CD in the first six months of 2020.
Streaming is taking the lion’s share more than ever
In detail, vinyl sales increased by 4% compared to the same period in 2019 and stand at 232 million dollars. In all, this weighs for 62% of physical income in this first half, but it is a drop in the overall turnover of the sector: 4%.
Physical sales totaled $ 376 million in revenue, down 23% year-over-year. As our colleagues from Engadget point out , the Covid-19 pandemic has passed through there and customers go much less to specialized stores. Suffice to say that this puts even more strain on an industry already in great difficulty in recent years.
Another finding that is far from surprising: the streaming boom. Services such as Spotify are doing well. The Swedish giant has 12 million additional Premium subscribers in six months for a total of 138 million worldwide. These paying customers are also becoming more and more necessary because the advertising revenue generated by music streaming is down 3% year on year in the United States.
As a reminder, this development in favor of vinyl does not date from yesterday. In 2012, it became the musical medium whose sales had increased the most in the USA, reaching a total of 3.2 million units sold that same year.
