**Vinyl Sales Statistics: What the Numbers Actually Measure** > Shipments, retail turnover, label revenue and production are four different things, and vinyl statistics mix them constantly. What each industry body publishes and which comparisons hold. Source: https://vinylai.app/vinyl-statistics/methodology/ Checked 2026-09-13 # What vinyl sales figures actually measure Almost every argument about whether vinyl is growing, and by how much, is really an argument between two numbers that were never measuring the same thing. This page is the key to the tables: what each body counts, what it calls it, and which comparisons survive contact with the definitions. ## Four different things, all called "sales" ### Shipments A shipment is a record leaving a distributor for a shop. It is counted when it ships, not when someone buys it, and in principle a record can be shipped, returned and never sold while still appearing in the year's figures. The RIAA's US database is built on shipments, valued at wholesale prices — which is also why RIAA revenue is smaller than what the public actually spent. ### Retail trade turnover What the market is worth at the point of sale. Germany's BVMI reports *Handelsumsatz* on this basis, so a German figure and an American one differ not only by market size but by where in the chain the money was counted. ### Label revenue What labels booked. France's SNEP reports *chiffre d'affaires*, and Italy's FIMI reports on a comparable basis. This sits between the two above: closer to wholesale than to the till, but recognised differently again. ### Production How many discs were manufactured, and their value at list price. Japan's RIAJ publishes this, monthly, with analogue records on their own line. Production is the furthest of the four from consumer spending and the most useful of the four for answering "how much vinyl physically exists". ## What this means in practice - **Growth rates within one country, across years, are safe.** The same body measuring the same way is the comparison that always holds. - **Shares within one country are safe.** Vinyl's share of the physical market comes from one body's own numbers. - **Absolute values between countries are not comparable** without saying which metric each is, and usually not even then. - **Growth rates between countries are weak** comparisons, because a market counted at the till and a market counted at the warehouse respond to different things. - **Never add figures of different types together** to reach a regional or global total. That total is the most commonly published wrong number in this subject. ## Currency Figures stay in the currency their source published them in. Where a body publishes the same year in two currencies — FIMI issues an English edition in US dollars — both are reported as published and neither is converted into the other. A conversion needs a rate and a date, and a rate applied silently turns a fact into an estimate. ## Dates Each figure carries the year of the data, not the year of publication. Annual reports land at different times: BVMI publishes Germany's year in late February, SNEP and FIMI early in the year, RIAJ's Year Book in June. For several months every year the newest available figure for one country is a year behind another's, and a table that does not say so reads as though one market stalled. ## What each body publishes | Body | Country | What it measures | When it publishes | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | [RIAA](https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/) | United States | Wholesale revenue from shipments to retail, by format, in an interactive database that runs back to 1973. Shipments are not sales: a record shipped to a shop and never sold still counts. | Year-end and mid-year | | [BVMI](https://www.musikindustrie.de/musikindustrie-in-zahlen) | Germany | Handelsumsatz — retail trade turnover, what the market is worth at the till. Vinyl is reported separately with its share of the physical market. | Annual figures in late February; a half-year report in summer | | [SNEP](https://snepmusique.com/communiques-dossiers-de-presse/bilan-2025-snep/) | France | Chiffre d'affaires — revenue booked by labels, in euros. Vinyl is a separate line within the physical segment. | Annual, early in the year; plus a half-year bilan | | [FIMI](https://www.fimi.it/mercato-musicale/dati-di-mercato/) | Italy | Revenue for the market, plus unit counts for the physical segment, which is where the vinyl-versus-CD split is reported. An English edition is published alongside. | Annual, early in the year; plus a half-year report | | [IFPI](https://www.ifpi.org/global-music-report-2026-global-recorded-music-revenues-grow-6-4-as-record-companies-drive-innovation/) | Global | Trade revenue — what record companies book, worldwide. The full report is paid, but the annual press release carries the global total and the growth rate for each format, including vinyl. It does NOT break vinyl revenue out by market, so no country figure can be taken from it. | Annual, March | | [RIAJ](https://www.riaj.or.jp/e/data/) | Japan | Production — how many discs were manufactured and their value at list price, with analogue records as their own line. Production is neither shipments nor sales, and Japan is the only one of these bodies that reports it monthly. | Year Book in June; production statistics monthly | ## What is not on these pages - **Aggregators.** Statista and similar are not treated as sources; the body that published the number is. - **Forecasts** unless labelled as forecasts, and never in a first screen. - **Our own store directory as market data.** It is built on a places API that caps out at around twenty shops per city, which is a limit of the API and not a fact about Berlin. Using it to rank cities would be inventing a measurement. - **Any figure we did not read at its source.** The hub lists what is still unverified instead of filling the gap from somewhere else. [Back to the figures](https://vinylai.app/vinyl-statistics/) · [Download the data](https://vinylai.app/vinyl-statistics/data/) --- HTML version: https://vinylai.app/vinyl-statistics/methodology/ Structured data for this site: https://vinylai.app/api/v1/openapi.json · https://vinylai.app/llms.txt Free to quote and reuse with a link back to the source URL above (CC BY 4.0).