Vinyl Sales Keep Rising—But It’s Complicated

In 2017, vinyl sales in the U.S. rose for the 12th straight year, according to Nielsen Music. What the latest gains mean has spurred some discussion, though: In an era of data overload, when streaming analytics can break down a song’s popularity to the most minute detail, vinyl metrics can still be pretty murky. Who’s truly tallying up what we buy at some grimy venue’s merch table? Plus, fledgling one-person labels typically don’t report their sales to data trackers. Even Jack White’s Third Man Records doesn’t report most of its sales, either, according to co-founder Ben Blackwell. Captured Tracks owner Mike Sniper, who was a buyer at New York City’s Academy Records in the mid-2000s, at the start of the vinyl resurgence, remembers certain indie records selling “hand over fist” before the numbers reflected it. So, as with so many vinyl records themselves, the official figures are embedded with imperfections.

That said, according to Nielsen, vinyl LP sales climbed by 9 percent last year to a record-high 14.3 million albums. That pace of growth was down from previous years’ double-digit gains, leading some to declare an end to the vinyl boom. But a newer data tracker, BuzzAngle Music, tabulated vinyl sales as up by 20 percent—but only totalling 8.6 million. (The two services have slightly different methodologies and have at times conflicted.) Meanwhile, both eBay and online vinyl marketplace Discogs showed double-digit vinyl gains as well. Elsewhere, vinyl sales soared 27 percent in the UK and 22 percent in Canada. If there’s a downturn looming, it’s not here yet.

More Pressing Plants Are Now Churning Out Vinyl

Not long ago, supply problems looked like they might end up hobbling the vinyl resurgence despite fervent demand. Around 2015, backlogs at pressing plants could routinely take six months or more. For smaller labels, that was a long time with their payment locked up and no product to show for it. As recently as 2016, Billboard reported that “no one makes” vinyl presses anymore.

Over the past couple of years, though, a handful of enterprising companies—Newbilt, Viryl Technologies, and Pheenix Alpha—have indeed begun manufacturing new vinyl presses. Most prominently, Newbilt’s machines have been called into action at Third Man’s recently opened Detroit pressing plant. Alex DesRoches, head of marketing for Viryl, tells Pitchfork that Independent Record Pressing, a plant opened in New Jersey by the indie label family Secretly Group and an exec from the long-running alternative label Epitaph in 2015, has fully switched over to its brand-new presses, which are billed as faster and less prone to error. More generally, vinyl pressing plants are opening up all over. One that’s expected to start operations early this year in Northern Virginia would reportedly add 9 million records a year to the current annual U.S. production capacity of 50 million.

Though presses are still notoriously tied up every year before Record Store Day in April, the benefits from all this new supply are evident even beyond the labels big enough to open their own factories. Jessi Frick, who co-runs indie-rock imprint Father/Daughter from her home, tells Pitchfork she’s seen turnaround times improve. “It doesn’t feel as much of a pain in the ass as it used to be,” she says.