Spotify and vinyl records emerge as 2014’s music victors

According to Nielsen SoundScan, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, 2014 was a really bad year for digital music sales but an insanely good one for vinyl record sales. Last year, vinyl sales actually hit 9.2 million, which is more than 50% more than what they were back in 2013 and are the highest that they’ve been since SoundScan began recording the numbers back in 1991.

Paid downloads for songs and albums shrunk by 12% and 9% respectively thanks to increased competition from the cheaper and more convenient option: streaming. Music streaming services such as Spotify and Rdio have been exploding in popularity thanks to the fact that you can pay a monthly fee to listen to an unlimited number of songs an unlimited number of times for the same price that you’d pay to purchase a single album. That’s why digital music sales have dropped from 1.26 billion in 2013 to 1.1 billion last year.

Fortunately, what revenue was lost from declining digital music sales may have been regained from the sale of vinyl records. While CDs have been effectively rendered obsolete thanks to the increased storage capacity of personal electronics and the rise of cloud storage, vinyl records offer something that no other medium can. As Gizmodo discussed earlier last year, vinyl truly is an excellent way to listen to music, offering an unparalleled experience to listeners.

Hipster jokes aside, the fact that sales for vinyl records are more than nine times what they were less than a decade ago, it’s clear that this isn’t just some fad for supercilious music elitists. This, paired with the fact that music streaming services saw a similar amount of growth, could give us an idea of what the future of music may look like, and it certainly looks like an appealing feature to me. I’ve long since abandoned my hybrid library of purchased-pirated music in favor of Spotify and Pandora, and I haven’t regretted it since.