Vinyl Records Outsold Digital Downloads In the UK Last Week (adweek.com)

Sales of vinyl outstripped those of downloaded music for the first time since the advent of digital downloads last week in the UK. From a report on AdWeek: The U.K.-based Entertainment Retailers Association, or ERA, said Monday that Britons spent 2.4 million pounds ($3.03 million) on the old-school wax last week while only doling out 2.1 million pounds ($2.65 million) for digital downloads. Vinyl Factory, a website dedicated to records, reported that those numbers represent a big change from the same week in 2015, when just 1.2 million pounds was spent on records compared with 4.4 million on digital downloads. That's a 100 percent year-over-year increase in vinyl sales and also the first time that vinyl album sales have bested digital downloads over a weeklong period in years, per Vinyl Factory. The surge in vinyl sales could be attributed to the popularity of vinyl as a Christmas gift and the growing number of retailers. You know it's a gift because, as BBC adds: But 48% of those surveyed said they did not play the vinyl they bought -- while 7% did not even own a turntable.

Comments

Re:A perfect Christmas gift...

[cayenne8]

I really miss speakers that are made with real wood enclosures they sounded so much fuller, crisper, and bigger. Then again I have a tube stack with a 4x12 oak slant back offset classic and greenback Celestions that sounds like it's a crisp 300 watts (it's only 200) compared to the new stuff anyway.

Me too.

I have a pair of Klipschorns 50th anniversary speakers ....horn loaded, VERY efficient, and they are made to run with tube amps. I have a couple of older Decware SET amps (I have the long old, SE84C). .....sounds really nice. I'd like to some day get an old McIntosh amp, but even old 60's versions are pretty $$$$.

I'm very tempted to dig out my old turn table...I'm SO disappointed with so many of the new "remixes" they have been putting out of my artists which are classic rocksters.....they have succumbed to the compression wars and there is no fucking dynamic range anymore.

From what I understand, with the physical limitations of the vinyl format, they really can't over compress. Even though my hearing isn't what it used to be, I can still hear that my music often doesn't sound as good as it did when I was a kid. With new stuff, I quickly get ear fatigue, but with something well recorded on my system, even at pretty high volumes, I don't get ear fatigue and can listen endlessly.

I have a few gems on digital...Jethro Tull's Aqualung put out a year or so ago for a remastered anniversary edition is amazingly well done. It has plenty of dynamic range, and they've brought forth instruments that I'd never really heard before..it is great.

But like my Stones re-issues...ugh...they've killed what used to be fun recordings.

I'm hoping my vinyl experiment might give me back the sound I want to hear....and not be processed to sound like shit like so many engineers seem to aspire to create (or destroy).

It's not the vinyl, it's the subscriptions

[EvilSS]

This trend has less to do with the increasing vinyl sales and more to do with the fact that more and more people are getting their digital music from a subscription service vs buying it outright. Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, Google, and Apple music services are gobbling up digital sales.