The shocking truth about vinyl. Nobody expected this

Although we live in the era of streaming content, it turns out that the music market is doing better than ever, partly due to vinyl. In 2024, sales reached record results, and the music market surpassed other branches of entertainment.

The music market has surpassed the film market

In a surprising new report, Pivotal Economics found that the value of music copyrights (and the revenues from them) exceeded the revenues from the film industry. In 2019, cinema outperformed music by 33%. at the end of 2023, this situation was reversed and now the music industry (if we count the value of copyrights) is worth 38% more than the cinema box office and its value is estimated at $45.5 billion. For comparison, the global cinema box office of 2023 is USD 31.6 billion.

For this $45.5 billion consists of royalties from record sales, streaming, radio plays and concert performances. It is also worth highlighting as an interesting statistic that in 2023, 43 million vinyl records were sold, i.e. 6 million more than CDs – this is the second time in the history of these media since 1987. However, it must be mentioned that vinyl sales, although impressive, are only a small part of this huge renaissance of the music market.

What’s interesting, but probably unsurprising, is this music streaming has eclipsed radio and other forms of music streaming as the primary revenue generatorwhen a decade ago it was completely the opposite (50% of revenues then came from radio plays, and only 5% from streaming).

They also play an important role concerts, the profits from which, taken as a whole, exceed royalties from public places for playing music (e.g. in shopping centers). You can read the entire report here.