We've known that vinyl sales have been pretty substantial as of late, even on a microcosmic scale looking just at the rock and metal genre. How many pre-order options have you seen in the past year where vinyl wasn't included? Even my local record stores around New Jersey have expanded their vinyl sections to some extent in the past year just to hold more titles.
According to Nielsen Soundscan, a whopping 9.2 million vinyl records were sold in 2014, which is up 52-percent from 2013's 6.1 million vinyl sold. Think about that for second- in one year an additional 3.1 million records were sold. In 2012 there were just over 4 million sold and 2011 an 2010 combined would put you at just about 2013's number. Talk about a format comeback, huh? Did any of you guys buy vinyllast year?
CD sales were pretty bad in 2014, going from 289.4 million sold in 2013 to 257 million in 2014. Then digital album sales went from 2013's 117.6 million to 2014's 106.5 million and digital single songs went from 1.26 billion in 2013 to 1.1 billion in 2014. Granted, you have to keep in mind these numbers don't account for sites like Bandcamp and Soundcloud sales (I'm pretty sure after researching the topic for a little bit). Not that that'll put some of these numbers in the black, but it's worth thinking about.
Speaking of numbers in the black, audio and video streams were up! In 2013, y'all streamed 106 billion songs and videos and in 2014 that number rose to 164 billion.
