Continuing one of the more surprising comebacks of the digital age vinyl album sales in the united states have grown for the 14th consecutive year.
Vinyl vs cd sales graph.
In 2019 18 8 million lps were sold in the.
The vinyl revival is the renewed interest and increased sales of vinyl records or gramophone records that has been taking place in the western world since about 2007.
The above bar charts give us a pretty good overall picture for the past few decades but the data we re actually interested in comparing recent vinyl and cd sales is just a tiny portion in the bottom right corner of the bar chart.
Ldprod istock via getty images.
In a sign of the times two of the records nominated for album of the.
Let s subset the data and create a line chart which will be much better for comparing and.
The analogue format made of polyvinyl chloride had been the main vehicle for the commercial distribution of pop music from the 1950s until the 1980s and 1990s when they were largely replaced by the compact disc cd.
A digital recording takes snapshots of the analog signal at a certain rate for cds it is 44 100 times per second and measures each snapshot with a certain accuracy for cds it is 16 bit which means the value must be one of 65 536 possible values.
Sales of audio cds have been declining in recent years mostly due to the growth of music downloads.
Vinyl revenue grew by 12 8 in.
The picture is the same in america where cd sales have fallen 80 in the last decade from roughly 450 million to 89 million.
The 2020s have officially begun but based on the music.
Although vinyl record technologies can be traced back to the phonautograph of the 1850s modern vinyl records didn t really become the standard.
The digital compact disc format evolved into multiple forms to handle data cd rom dvd blu ray.
Vinyl records earned 224 1 million on 8 6 million units in the first half of 2019 closing in on the 247 9 million on 18 6 million units generated by cd sales.
Original sound is analog by definition.
Amid all the talk of music streaming and the renaissance of vinyl the continued plummeting of cd sales hasn t been getting a lot of attention in recent years according to the recording industry.