Comfortable Disappearance

I just across a neat piece by Time Magazine that has some good news for fans of vinyl records:

990,000 vinyl albums were sold in 2007, up 15.4% from the 858,000 units bought in 2006.

This 15.4% increase is a notable change in the span of one year. The increase is likely even higher given that these numbers account only for new vinyl that is registered through Nielson’s SoundScan sales tracking system. Some stores like Orpheus don’t have their sales tracked through Nielson, and sales of old vinyl are also not tracked.

It would be naive for anyone to argue that vinyl will overcome CD sales, but this is good news for vinyl geeks. With increasing sales, artists will continue to notice the value of vinyl for their fans, and will hopefully continue to increase the effort they put into vinyl releases.