Midnights

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This year vinyl album sales are expected to grow for the 15th consecutive year to about 5.5m, the most since 1990, with the 80,000 copies of Swift’s Midnights the most of any album in a calendar year this century. What started as a vinyl renaissance built largely by older music fans seeking collectible editions of treasured albums – mostly classic artists such as the Beatles, David Bowie and Pink Floyd – has since spread to younger generations of fans in love with retro music formats including cassettes. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. Will the CD disappear? Of course its prospects don’t look good right now, but it offers a permanence and robustness and quality which is unique,” says Bayley. “Given how wrong we were about vinyl, it would be foolish to write off the CD for ever.” While CD sales have endured years of precipitous declines – having peaked at 2.45bn globally in 2000 just as digital music emerged to presage the streaming revolution that has transformed music listening – the classic LP has somewhat counterintuitively experienced a striking revival in popularity.

It’s a watershed moment for the entire music industry,” says Kim Bayley, the chief executive of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA). “After the CD came along and pretty much wiped out the vinyl business, few of us would have believed a renaissance like this was possible.” Cassette sales, which hit 185,000 last year, are expected to be up year on year as the format continues to experience its own mini revival. Top 10 bestselling vinyl albums of 2022 The pandemic accelerated music-buying habits as fans unable to go to gigs and events channelled their spare cash into building up their record collections at home. While LP sales will continue to rise to a more than four-decade high in 2022, music fans appear to finally be reaching “peak vinyl” with figures expected to show growth in unit sales slowing to just a few percentage points year on year. More than 14m CDs were sold last year, with a significant double-digit percentage annual fall expected when official figures for 2022 come in next week.

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