One in every 25 vinyl albums sold in USA in 2022 was by Taylor Swift
The data comes as pressing plants face huge backlogs and waiting lists
Last year, one in every 25 vinyl albums sold in the USA was a Taylor Swift LP, selling 1,695,000 across her entire discography of LP releases, Billboard reports.
Her total was considerably more than the next two artists combined, with Harry Styles selling 719,00 and The Beatles 553,000 making a total of 1,272,000.
The success was driven mainly by her latest album ‘Midnights’, which sold 945,000 copies, making it the top-selling vinyl album in 2022.
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It was also the highest grossing in traditional album sales. With a total of 1,800,000 across vinyl, CD, cassette and digital purchases, it was the highest selling album since 2017, when her album ‘Reputation’ sold 1,900,000.
On top of the success of her latest album, six of the top 40 selling albums were by Swift, including ‘Folklore’ (174,000), ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’ (153,000) and ‘Evermore’ (134,000).
Her dominance over vinyl sales comes in the face of the vinyl production industry struggling to keep up with an estimated $1 billion demand for records.
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Despite a number of record pressing factories having been built in the last decade or so, there has been a shortage of available pressing plants overall, with major labels and their larger orders taking up much of the capacity.
It means that smaller, independent record labels have struggled to find plants with capacity to press their orders. Read more about the vinyl industry’s struggles in Mixmag’s 2021 investigation.
Although ‘Midnights’ was the highest selling album traditionally, music data tracking firm Luminate found that the most popular album in the USA was Bad Bunny’s ‘Un Verano Sin Ti’, taking into account streaming data on top of sales.
In the UK, Harry Styles had the year’s best-selling album with ‘Harry’s House’. Swift’s ‘Midnight’ was third.
***Isaac Muk is Mixmag's Digital Intern, *follow him on Twitter****