FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Seven Things We Learned from Discogs’ State of Record Sales Report

Hold on to those records, cassettes, and minidiscs!

Online marketplace and music database Discogs is flexing its muscles with a new app, and a just released year-end sales report for 2015 that is chock-full of interesting data. The Discogs app will help keep users plug into the digital marketplace by offering access to the site's database with an experience tailored to mobile users; it will also include features like an integrated barcode scanner to compare online prices while shopping.

Advertisement

Their 2015 report gives a compelling look at the music industry from a slightly more outsider perspective than, say, the Billboard charts. The report pays special attention to the formats in which consumers buy music: looking at sales and growth statistics in everything from vinyl and cassettes to MP3s and CDs. We took a close look at the numbers, and here's the most interesting stuff we we discovered:

Record collectors really like Aphex Twin.
Three of Discog's top 30 collected albums are by Richard D. James. There are also two White Stripes albums and one solo Jack White record in the top 30, but that's less surprising, given how much he caters to the collector market.

Electronic music is really popular.
The only genre with more titles in the user collection database than electronic is rock.

If you're an old, broke punk rocker, dig up your record collection.
Two of the ten most expensive records sold on Discogs in 2015 were punk discs: Judge's Chung King Can Suck It, and The Damned's Damned Damned Damned.

Pop and rock have the most total releases, but electronic isn't far behind .
The total number of electronic releases in the database is also growing faster than rock.

We may have hit the peak of the vinyl revival.
While there are still far more vinyl releases in the database than any other format, that category also had less growth than any other medium.

The formats that experienced the most growth in the database were cassettes and "other."
The latter category includes 8-tracks, minidiscs, and MP3s.

When it comes to actual sales, vinyl still moves way more than any other category.
The format moved almost five times as many units as CDs. However, it also experienced less growth than CDs or cassettes, so maybe hold on to those old tapes for a few more years.

Benjamin Boles is on Twitter.