Vinyl and cassette sales are skyrocketing thanks to guess who?!?!?

[samhexum]

Thanks to a handful of big name musicians, vinyl sales skyrocketed this year, with the BBC reporting that the UK topped 5 million record sales for the first time since 1991. 

Indeed, the past 12 months saw vinyl sales up 8% over 2020, an increase partially due to the release of a few blockbuster albums by the likes of Adele, Ed Sheeran and most markedly, Abba.

The Swedish super group’s release of “Voyage,” their first new album in over 40 years, sold 29,891 copies in its first week alone and soon became this century’s fastest vinyl seller, according to the Official Charts Company.

CDs, meanwhile, saw sales drop 12% since last year, with only 14 million discs selling in the UK — the least amount since 1988, six years after the format was born in the nation. 

Abba’s international releases are displayed at the Abba museum in Stockholm

Cassettes saw more success than CDs in 2021, with sales increasing for the ninth year in a row. Still, the sale amount is relatively tiny, with just 190,000 tapes sold this year. That trend may also be more attributable not to format popularity but bundle deals, in which artists sell signed cassettes with every CD or vinyl album purchase, the BBC noted.

This year’s top-selling cassettes included Queen’s “Greatest Hits,” Lana Del Rey’s “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” and in the No. 1 slot, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour.”

https://nypost.com/2021/12/29/vinyl-sales-are-skyrocketing-thanks-to-abba/

This just makes me happy.  I wonder what will happen to sales when they release their next album in another 40 years.

Edited December 30, 2021 by samhexum
Just for the hell of it.

[+ WilliamM]

I spent two weeks in Stockholm in 2011 and grew to like Abba.

But, I was a bit more impressed by seeing the house where Greta Garbo was born, which I saw by  accident

Edited December 30, 2021 by WilliamM