Sales of vinyl and magnetic tapes are growing.

The other day, the network has an analysis of sales of music albums on such media as vinyl records and cassettes. As it turned out, sales are gradually growing, and this growth is very significant. As for vinyl, in percentage terms the growth was 12%, from 8.6 million to 9.7 million. Cassettes are selling even better - an increase of more than 19%, from 99,400 to 118200. And this is statistics only in the USA, in the world, more likely All in all, the numbers are even more impressive.

Mostly sold albums of artists and bands, popular in previous years. These are mainly recordings by Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd. These artists and bands sold best last year. In some cases, sales are also stimulated by modern compositions (for example, the Guardians of the Galaxy 2014 audio compilation). But in most cases it is still about the “masters”.

As for cassettes, the majority of cassettes sold (52.2%) contain recordings of compositions that are more than three years old. Only about a third do not fall under this pattern, being more new (about a year and a half). Vinyl sales of fresh tracks (one and a half years or less) account for about a quarter of total sales.

About 40% of the sold vinyl records contain records of rock music, 25% - pop music. R & B and hip-hop account for 7.9 and 6.6% of the total sales of music on records.

Nevertheless, the dynamics of sales of musical compositions on physical media is still negative. All thanks to the CD, which is sold all the worse, not having any attributes of "lamp-like". Cassettes and vinyl records attract nostalgic music lovers, but practically no one has a delicate feeling to the CD, so to speak. For most buyers, they are relatively new, so that the desire to buy them in order to “brush off the dust” does not arise. Plus, they are quite inconvenient, losing in all respects to online services, including cloud data storage.

In the United States in 2018, about 60 million CDs were sold, which is a percentage of minus 18.5% compared with 2017 sales.

But online content is becoming more popular. For example, the popularity of online audio has grown by 41.8%, this is the maximum level of growth among all types of sales of music content.