FOR VINYL CITIZENS

CITIZEN VINYL, A CULTURAL HUB FOR VINYL LOVERS, LAUNCHES IN THE BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS.

- BILL KOPP

The heyday of vinyl records — the so-called “album era” — spanned from 1964 to the mid’90s. But the advent of CDs and then the internet seemed to spell the end for the cherished format. In 1993, vinyl album sales in the United States had dropped to their lowest-ever point, with only about 300,000 units sold. (Compare that figure to those of Pink Floyd’s 1973 LP The Dark Side of the Moon; it sold nearly twice as many units in its first month.)

Seemingly superseded by CDs and downloads, vinyl records continued to be pressed, and sold in limited quantities. But — according to figures from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), through 2007 vinyl album sales were essentially flat, hovering around the one million units per year mark. Though by then CD sales were also in decline (from a late ’90s high of nearly a thousand million units), CDs still accounted for more than 500 million units sold. With a market share of less than 0.2%, the vinyl LP qualified as a niche item.

But around 2008, something unexpected happened: sales of vinyl records began to climb. According to data complied by Statista, for every year since then, vinyl record sales have increased anywhere from 21% (2010-2011) to 51% (2013-2014). In 2019, nearly 19 million vinyl records were sold in the U.S. While not completely moribund, CD sales for that year dropped to 46.6 million units. (And because the retail price of records today is sometimes higher than CDs, the RIAA reports that annual revenue from records actually surpassed that of compact discs in 2019.)