The new pop stars turn vinyl sales upside down

It's been almost a decade since the music industry managed to dust off vinyl from its trunk of memories.

The sector has grown since 2013, when 140,000 vinyl records were sold in Spain, to more than 1,500,000 copies recorded in 2022. The situation has been similar in countries such as the United Kingdom, where in the last weeks of 2023 Taylor Swift and The Rolling Stones sold more than 250,000 between them.

In addition, the American artist accounted for 7% of vinyl sales throughout the country last year.

They have become an object that every fan wants to have.

If the new versions of her catalog that Taylor Swift is recording and releasing have anything in common - her

1989 (Taylor's Version)

was the most shipped vinyl in Spain in 2023 - and the latest albums by Aitana, C. Tangana, Rosalía, Olivia Rodrigo and Harry Styles, is that they topped the list of best-selling vinyl in Spain last year, according to the Association of Music Producers of Spain (Promusicae), a true stylistic turn in the vinyl market in the 21st century.

The best sellers of the last decade in Spain are

Rumors

(1977), by Fleetwood Mac;

followed by

The Dark Side of the Moon

(1973), by Pink Floyd, and

Abbey Road

(1969), by The Beatles.

The artist who has sold the most vinyl records in the world so far this century is none other than David Bowie.

All the great rock and pop stars of the 20th century and none of them active.

This format, then, is ceasing to be a nostalgic niche—the only current band that makes it onto the best-selling vinyl lists is Arctic Monkeys—to become a field in which the new stars of the music industry come to compete (and sell). pop.

“People are not buying the album to listen to it again.

Now it is a collector's item,” emphasizes Miguel Ángel Sánchez, president of the Independent Phonographic Union (UFI).

According to a study by Luminate, an American company specialized in data analysis related to the world of music, 50% of vinyl record buyers in the United States did not have a record player at home.

“Although there are many people who continue buying them to listen to them, others buy it as a testimonial album.

They hang the vinyl on the wall of their houses,” says José Luis Fernández, from Discos Killers, in Madrid.

Stores of this format that have stood the test of time are visited almost like going to a museum.

Great music classics from the end of the last century such as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen still hang on its walls.

The nuance is that now they join together with

Motomami

, by Rosalía;

Cowboys de la A3

, by Arde Bogotá, and

Bellodrama

, by Ana Mena.

The vinyl factories, which closed in the nineties due to the decline in sales of this format and the rise of CDs, are now being collapsed by the

majors

.

“When the biggest labels realized that LPs were now cult objects, they cornered the raw materials and the pressing market,” explains Sánchez.

And the problem, according to him, is the shortage of factories in Spain - and the few that resist outside, in Holland and the Czech Republic - and the production queue that has generated the boom in multinational musical production in this format.

His words refer to what music journalist Ben Sisario already predicted in

The New York Times

in a report on the sale of vinyl in 2021: “They may end up becoming just another

merchandising

object .”

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