United Record Pressing, Nashville. The revival runs on plants that never quite closed.
Photo: Unitedbuilding · Wikimedia Commons
Record labels: the rooms, the people, the catalogues.
After three decades of CD dominance, RIAA data for 2022 showed vinyl revenue pulling ahead — the first time since 1987.
United Record Pressing, Nashville. The revival runs on plants that never quite closed.
Photo: Unitedbuilding · Wikimedia Commons
The turnaround had been gathering for fifteen years before it registered as historic. Vinyl unit sales in the United States bottomed out around 2007, when RIAA figures recorded roughly 900,000 LPs shipped. The climb that followed was slow at first — 2.8 million units in 2010, 9.2 million in 2014 — then increasingly steep, reaching 27.5 million in 2020 and 41.7 million in 2021. By 2022, the format generated approximately $1.2 billion in revenue against the CD's $483 million, a reversal that would have seemed unimaginable at the CD's peak.
Between the tape and the shop there are four more trades: mastering, plating, pressing and printing. A label that could not book all four had no product at all.
Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko / Pexels
Sun 209, July 1954.
Photo: Diana ✨ / Pexels
The 1987 comparison matters because it marks the last year in which vinyl had led the CD in US revenue, before the compact disc took over. Thirty-five years of CD ascendancy, then collapse into streaming, had left the compact disc as a niche product oriented toward classical buyers and dedicated J-pop markets, while vinyl found a second consumer base that overlapped almost minimally with the first.
| ~900,000 | estimated US vinyl units shipped at the 2007 trough (RIAA) |
| 41.7 million | US vinyl units shipped, 2021 (RIAA) |
| ~$1.2 billion vs $483 million | vinyl vs CD US revenue, 2022 (RIAA) |
| 1987 | last year before 2022 that vinyl had led CD in US revenue |
Pressing capacity lagged demand badly. United Record Pressing in Nashville — the largest plant in North America — ran multiple shifts and still logged delivery times measured in months. QRP (Quality Record Pressings) in Salina, Kansas, became the preferred facility for audiophile reissues, shipping 180-gram pressings of Blue Note and ECM titles whose original masters had been held in storage for decades. Demand was not, however, principally archival: Taylor Swift's Midnights was the best-selling vinyl album of 2023 in the United States, demonstrating that the format's commercial engine ran on new pop releases as much as on back-catalogue nostalgia. Independent record stores, sustained in part by Record Store Day (founded 2008), provided the retail infrastructure that chain electronics stores no longer offered. The format's cost floor — a new LP retailing at twenty-five to forty dollars — meant that vinyl revenue could outstrip CD revenue on relatively modest unit differences.