The vinyl boom doesn’t show any signs of going away.
In 2014, for the first time, LP and EP sales revenue ($315 million) topped the revenue generated by music played on free, ad-supported streaming services such as YouTube and Spotify’s basic platform ($295 million). Last year, that trend accelerated; vinyl sales, according to the RIAA, surpassed $416 million, while revenue from ad-supported streaming rose to $385 million. Note that both revenue streams rose.
The real significance here, though, lies in a comparison of the number of physical vinyl records sold versus the number of streams on ad-supported services. Just 17 million records sold generated more revenue than the hundreds of billions of songs people streamed online in 2015.
“We, and so many of our music community brethren, feel that some technology giants have been enriching themselves at the expense of the people who actually create the music,” wrote CEO and Chairman Cary Sherman. That category doesn’t just encompass the artists—labels, producers, engineers and everyone else who works on the process of distributing recorded music is seeing a disproportionate amount of the ad revenue their songs generate go toward the services themselves. With numbers such as these backing it up, the music industry looks poised to fight for its just rewards.