For years now we’ve been living in a vinyl revival, with sales of vinyl LPs and the best turntables in rude health. But new data from Billboard suggests that this particular listening party could be coming to an end. Between 2023 and 2024, US vinyl sales dropped 33.3%. That’s much more of a drop than CD sales (down 19.5%) or digital albums (down 8.3%). And it’s not been replaced by streaming, which is only up 7.2%.
The problem’s pretty simple. Vinyl almost always costs too much now.
New releases are routinely priced at $30 / £30 or higher before shipping, and considerably more if there’s more than one disc. And old records are being rereleased and priced the same too – assuming they’re not being re-released as an even more expensive package such as Green Day’s 8LP American Idiot reissue ($199 / £239.99) or U2’s “Super Deluxe Collector” 8LP re-release of How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb ($299.98 / £229.99)
New vinyl is expensive in part because there aren’t enough places making vinyl records, and partly because the costs of making records have increased. But it’s also because of greed in both the new and the resale markets.
Opinion: the price of vinyl simply isn’t sustainable
New vinyl has been expensive for some time now, and limited supply is a key factor: there are only so many pressing plants that can make the records. When Adele’s record company got her 2021 album 30 manufactured, it took up so much capacity that other artists were facing wait times of up to nine months to get their own records made.
That problem has become worse since pop acts in particular started creating deliberate scarcity with multiple vinyl variants of the same record. Taylor Swift is probably the most high profile of these vinyl villains, making multiple versions of the same vinyl in slightly different colors (six colors for Midnights and approximately a million billion different variants of The Tortured Poets Department), but it’s widespread across mainstream music now.
The high prices and limited supply in retail are having a knock-on effect on resale too. If you spend any time on the r/vinyl subreddit or similar forums you’ll see redditors – redditors who love vinyl, redditors who’ve spent more on music than some of us spend on cars or feeding our families – talking in astonishment about the soaring prices of old records, the greed of second-hand sellers and why they’re scaling back their buying as a result of what many consider to be blatant price gouging. And as some point out, high prices doesn’t necessarily mean high quality either.
I love vinyl, and in a world where streaming CEOs have a higher net worth than almost any musician in history, I want to support artists directly by buying their stuff. But like many music fans, I’m buying a lot less now because I simply can’t afford the prices being charged.
Music is made to be listened to, not hung on a wall or kept in the hope of selling it on for a profit. But as with the cost of concert tickets, the cost of vinyl is excluding all but the most affluent.
