CDs pull ahead of vinyl in the 2024 sales race
As a fan of vinyl, I eagerly follow its fortunes via the weekly Luminate sales and streaming report. It’s not that I want CDs to completely crater, but it’s fun to see vinyl have such a good run.
This week, a reversal. For the last reporting period ending February 22, CDs outside vinyl 29,008 units to 25,032. CDs also saw a sales spike of 8.1% that week while vinyl dropped by 4.6%.
That was enough to allow CDs to pull ahead in the year-to-date sales race. So far in 2024, we’ve purchased 256,327 CDs and 253,806 pieces of fresh vinyl. (That vinyl figure does not count the sales of used records or anything that may be sold at record shows or online.)
Meanwhile, streaming continues to be adopted and used by more and more people. The number of streams are up 11.7% from this point last year. We also streamed 2.826 billion songs during that reporting period. That might be an all-time high and trends point to Canadians breaking the three billion stream mark later in 2024.
With the rise of vinyl prices, consumers who want a physical product are opting for cheaper formats. You wonder why cassettes are on the rise, that’s why. For a lot of people it’s a collectors game not a listening one.
Cassettes aren’t cheaper either. That Nirvana (supposedly official) soundboard cassette I bought during the pandemic? $20. Cassettes weren’t that expensive back when they were being mass produced. Are they, too, going to eventually hit an “increased manufacturing” limit which will cost cassette prices to go up (instead of down) once more people buy them in stores?