VinylAI Open data
53 years of U.S. music sales, 23 formats, one dataset
Fifty-three years of American format sales, read straight from the RIAA's own published extract. The figures below are on the page — no filter to set, nothing to click — and every one of them carries the arithmetic that produced it. There is an explorer further down for anyone who wants a different cut, plus CSV, JSON and an embeddable chart.
- Source
- RIAA, RIAJ, BPI, BVMI, SNEP, IFPI
- Coverage
- 53 years · 23 formats
- Measure
- Wholesale revenue
- Updated
- 2026-09-13
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
What the series says about vinyl in 2025
Each line is computed from the series, not typed in by hand, so none of them can drift from the data and all of them update when next year’s extract lands.
- 01
U.S. vinyl revenue reached $1.04bn in 2025 — its highest in nominal dollars since 1982.
LP/EP, wholesale, 2025. 1982 is the most recent earlier year whose nominal figure was larger.
- 02
Adjusted for inflation, that 2025 figure is 14.1% of vinyl's 1978 peak of $7.41bn in 2025 dollars.
$1.04bn ÷ $7.41bn, both in 2025 dollars.
- 03
Vinyl's best year in nominal terms remains 1978, at $1.50bn.
LP/EP, wholesale, nominal dollars, full series.
- 04
From its 1978 peak to its floor in 2005, U.S. vinyl revenue fell 99.8% in real terms.
$7.41bn (1978) → $14.2m (2005), in 2025 dollars.
- 05
2025 was vinyl's 20th consecutive year of nominal revenue growth in the United States.
Counted back from 2025 while each year exceeds the one before it.
- 07
No format has matched the CD's 1999 peak of $14.14bn in 2025 dollars.
CD, wholesale, inflation-adjusted, full series.
The one distinction that decides the story
Vinyl really is selling better than at any point since the early 1980s, and the nominal record is real. But $1.04bn in 2025 buys a fraction of what $1.50bn bought in 1978. Measured in the same dollars, the format is still running at a seventh of its 1978 peak.
Both statements come from the same RIAA series. Which one you cite depends only on whether the figure is inflation-adjusted — which is why every number on this site says which it is, and why the tables carry both columns side by side.
The industry by decade
| Period | All formats | Vinyl | Vinyl share | Vinyl per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1973–1979 | $66.35bn | $41.96bn | 63.2% | $5.99bn |
| 1980s | $81.15bn | $27.02bn | 33.3% | $2.70bn |
| 1990s | $134.33bn | $424m | 0.3% | $42.4m |
| 2000s | $113.64bn | $287m | 0.3% | $28.7m |
| 2010s | $71.81bn | $2.36bn | 3.3% | $236m |
| 2020–2025 | $67.66bn | $5.20bn | 7.7% | $866m |
All formats, inflation-adjusted to 2025 dollars. The 1970s row covers 1973–1979 because the series begins in 1973, and the 2020s are unfinished — the per-year column is the only fair comparison between them.
Build a different view
Every figure above is already on the page. This is for cutting it another way: up to four formats, any window from 1973 to 2025, nominal or 2025 dollars, as revenue, market share, an index or year-on-year change. The address bar updates as you go, so a tuned view can be linked and cited.
Wholesale dollars as reported.
▸Table of this view (53 rows)
| Year | LP/EP | CD |
|---|---|---|
| 1973 | $5.48bn | $0 |
| 1974 | $5.37bn | $0 |
| 1975 | $5.39bn | $0 |
| 1976 | $5.71bn | $0 |
| 1977 | $7.07bn | $0 |
| 1978 | $7.41bn | $0 |
| 1979 | $5.53bn | $0 |
| 1980 | $5.21bn | $0 |
| 1981 | $5.03bn | $0 |
| 1982 | $3.90bn | $0 |
| 1983 | $3.31bn | $31.7m |
| 1984 | $2.91bn | $183m |
| 1985 | $2.32bn | $665m |
| 1986 | $1.75bn | $1.56bn |
| 1987 | $1.36bn | $2.58bn |
| 1988 | $878m | $3.25bn |
| 1989 | $347m | $3.84bn |
| 1990 | $129m | $4.85bn |
| 1991 | $42.1m | $5.85bn |
| 1992 | $18.8m | $6.98bn |
| 1993 | $14.3m | $8.28bn |
| 1994 | $23.5m | $10.50bn |
| 1995 | $32.2m | $11.31bn |
| 1996 | $45.8m | $11.64bn |
| 1997 | $40.5m | $11.36bn |
| 1998 | $40.7m | $12.88bn |
| 1999 | $37.3m | $14.14bn |
| 2000 | $31.4m | $14.11bn |
| 2001 | $30.2m | $13.40bn |
| 2002 | $22.3m | $12.31bn |
| 2003 | $23.0m | $11.22bn |
| 2004 | $20.0m | $11.14bn |
| 2005 | $14.2m | $9.90bn |
| 2006 | $15.2m | $8.55bn |
| 2007 | $21.6m | $6.61bn |
| 2008 | $51.4m | $4.67bn |
| 2009 | $58.1m | $3.70bn |
| 2010 | $79.6m | $2.86bn |
| 2011 | $104m | $2.53bn |
| 2012 | $137m | $1.99bn |
| 2013 | $178m | $1.73bn |
| 2014 | $209m | $1.39bn |
| 2015 | $285m | $1.15bn |
| 2016 | $302m | $853m |
| 2017 | $323m | $755m |
| 2018 | $344m | $477m |
| 2019 | $405m | $443m |
| 2020 | $531m | $341m |
| 2021 | $807m | $401m |
| 2022 | $880m | $297m |
| 2023 | $957m | $364m |
| 2024 | $980m | $348m |
| 2025 | $1.04bn | $312m |
Cite this view
The link below reopens this exact slice — formats, years and dollar basis. Credit belongs to Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); cite them, and link here so a reader can check the slice.
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), U.S. recorded music revenue by format, 1973-2025 (LP/EP, CD, 1973–2025, inflation-adjusted dollars). Figures are wholesale revenue published by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); compiled and presented by VinylAI at https://vinylai.app/market/data/?f=LP%2FEP%2CCD&y=1973-2025&m=real&v=absolute (accessed 2026-09-13).
Vinyl production in Japan, 1994–2024
The world's largest physical-music market publishes its own series, but it counts something different: RIAJ reports production shipped by producers, not retail sales. These figures answer “how many records were pressed”, never “how many were bought”, and cannot be added to the revenue above.
RIAJ consolidated 7-inch and 10/12-inch analogue records into one vinyl line in 1994, so the series starts there. Figures are from the 2025 edition of the Yearbook; RIAJ revises earlier years between editions, so a 2020 figure quoted from an older edition may differ. Parsed from RIAJ Yearbook 2025, "Physical Products - Production on Unit Basis" and "... on Value Basis"; every row was reconciled against the printed column total before publication. The full table is on the Japan page.
Take the data, cite the source
Licensed CC BY 4.0. Credit the trade body that produced the figures — a link back lets your readers check the slice. Every file carries its source, measure and retrieval date in its own header.
Writing about this? The figures above are also available as embeddable charts — one line of HTML, no script, and the widget keeps its source line so your readers can check it.
Machine readers: every page here has a markdown twin at index.md, the statements above are served as structured claims in the page's JSON-LD, and facts.json carries all of them with their arithmetic. The catalogue entry lives at /.well-known/ai-catalog.json.
Everything behind this page
- 01
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
U.S. Sales Database / U.S. Recorded Music Analysis
1973–2025, 23 formats, wholesale revenue, nominal and inflation-adjusted · retrieved 2026-09-13
Figures were read from the published data extract behind RIAA’s own dashboard, last updated 2 August 2026 — not re-typed from a news report.
https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ - 02
Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ)
RIAJ Yearbook 2025 — Statistics for Physical Products
1994–2024, vinyl production in units and yen · retrieved 2026-09-13
Parsed from the Yearbook’s own production tables. Every parsed row was checked against the table’s printed Total; all 31 rows reconcile.
https://www.riaj.or.jp/f/en/data/ - 03
British Phonographic Industry (BPI)
UK recorded music market 2025
2025 vinyl revenue, growth and physical share · retrieved 2026-09-13
https://www.bpi.co.uk/news/13097053 - 04
Bundesverband Musikindustrie (BVMI)
Musikindustrie in Deutschland 2025
2025 German market, physical segment, vinyl share and growth · retrieved 2026-09-13
Read in the German original. BVMI’s English edition renders the 44.2% share ambiguously; the German text attributes it to vinyl (die Schallplatte) unambiguously.
https://www.musikindustrie.de/presse/presseinformationen/musikindustrie-in-deutschland-2025 - 05
SNEP
Bilan 2025 du marché de la musique enregistrée
2025 French market and vinyl revenue · retrieved 2026-09-13
https://snepmusique.com/communiques-dossiers-de-presse/bilan-2025-snep/ - 06
IFPI
Global Music Report 2026
2025 global revenue, vinyl and physical growth · retrieved 2026-09-13
https://www.ifpi.org/global-music-report-2026-global-recorded-music-revenues-grow-6-4-as-record-companies-drive-innovation/
The rest of the dataset
Built by VinylAI Market, where each release has a card with condition-by-condition values and listings from sellers worldwide. Spotted an error, or know a trade body publishing a series we should add? Tell us — corrections are published with the date they were made.