Don’t call it a comeback because it’s not one, really. Hipster beanie hats might be flung into the air in celebration over this week’s launch of a weekly vinyl chart in the UK, but vinyl is but a small part of the overall record business. So what is the point of this new system?
Developed by top-40 custodians the Official Chart Company, the new chart’s purpose is partly to fire the starting pistol on the marketing and hype around Record Store Day on 18 April, but also to applaud the recent growth in vinyl sales.
Vinyl LP sales last year in the UK stood at just under 1.3m and the format has been consistently growing for the past seven years. There are projections that 2m vinyl albums could be sold this year. This is all tremendous news – finally a positive story amid the continued crumbling of the CD market and, after a decade, the faltering of the download market. However, the surge in the popularity of crate digging only represents a niche pastime.
Last year, vinyl accounted for 1.5% of all UK album sales. While that was up from 0.8% in 2013 – at a time of little growth elsewhere – that figure still represents a minuscule share of the overall album business.
In 1995, vinyl made up only 1.6% – almost 1.4m records – of all album sales, so the format today hasn’t even rebounded to the scale it enjoyed at the peak of Britpop. If you compare this with sales in the late 70s – there were 86m LP sales in the UK in 1978, for example – it shows how far vinyl sales have dropped, even with their slight recent rallying.
The biggest cause of vinyl’s decline was the CD and the aggressive marketing behind it that ensured it became a high-margin success. The BPI started tracking sales of CDs in 1983, and by 1985 3.1m CD albums had been sold in the UK. That is nearly three times what vinyl sold last year. And this was a format that, at its introduction, was prohibitively expensive for most consumers, and one that required additional investment in costly new hardware.
To put the vinyl revival further into context, in the past 10 months Ed Sheeran has sold more CD copies of X (1.47m) than the entire vinyl LP sector sold last year. Vinyl’s cumulative performance in 2014 is only marginally ahead of the 1.2m CD copies Sam Smith’s In the Lonely Hour has sold since May last year.
It feels cruel to fire arrows at the UK vinyl chart, but its arrival feels considerably less seismic than the charts’ other recent and future changes. In March 2014, streaming data from services such as Spotify, Deezer and Rdio was added to the singles chart, marking the first time since the UK chart launched in 1952 that it was based on anything other than purchases of physical formats or downloads. In March this year, streams began counting towards the album chart. Another chart shakeup comes in July when the UK moves its chart rundown from a Sunday to a Friday to fall in line with the introduction of a new standardised global release date.
So will the vinyl chart benefit an alternative wave of artists? In the chart tracking cumulative vinyl album sales in the first three months of 2015, there is an encouraging tilt towards acts issued on indies: Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Arctic Monkeys, Public Service Broadcasting and War on Drugs are all in the top 10; that’s compared with only two independent albums in the top 10 of this week’s main album chart (All Time Low and Prodigy).
In the roundup for the first quarter of this year, both Physical Graffiti and The Dark Side of the Moon are also in the top 10, suggesting that major-label deluxe catalogue reissues could claim an increasingly significant part of this chart:
Official biggest-selling vinyl albums of first quarter 2015
- Chasing Yesterday – Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
- Physical Graffiti – Led Zeppelin
- AM – Arctic Monkeys
- Royal Blood – Royal Blood
- The Race for Space – Public Service Broadcasting
- Shadows in the Night – Bob Dylan
- The Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd
- Lost in the Dream – War on Drugs
- Happy People – Peace
- Four Symbols – Led Zeppelin
Given the recent criticisms of the majors monopolising pressing plants in the runup to Record Store Day – best articulated by Sonic Cathedral boss Nathaniel Cramp – the vinyl chart could also be something of which the independents will be wary, fearing its potential as another space for the big labels to dominate.
We should not, however, dismiss the vinyl chart too soon. It may mark a slow revolution, but at a time when tiny per-stream royalties are a bone of contention for numerous artists – no matter what Jay Z is promising with Tidal – the arrival of a chart where records sell for £20 or more each is being clung to as a portent of better times ahead.
