Vinyl Just Had Its Best Year Since 1983

The headline everyone repeated in early 2026 was the US one: vinyl passed $1 billion in America for the first time since 1983. We cited that same RIAA figure ourselves in our earlier look at why pressing plants can't keep up with demand. It's a real number and a genuinely remarkable one. But taken on its own, it understates what actually happened to vinyl in 2025, and understating it matters if you're trying to understand why a small label's pressing order still takes the better part of a year to come back.

The fuller picture, once the UK's BPI and the global IFPI both published their 2025 year end numbers, is that the US wasn't an outlier. It was one data point inside a worldwide pattern: vinyl's 19th consecutive year of global growth, the UK's steepest jump in vinyl revenue in more than three decades, and a format that keeps expanding everywhere streaming already won. That distinction, US phenomenon versus structural global one, is the actual story, and it's the one that explains why demand keeps outrunning every round of new pressing capacity the industry adds.

How much bigger is the global picture than the US number everyone quoted?

Considerably bigger, and that's the point. According to the IFPI's Global Music Report 2026, released March 18, 2026 and covering the 2025 calendar year, total global recorded music revenue grew 6.4% to $31.7 billion, with paid subscriptions reaching 837 million users worldwide, as Music Business Worldwide reported. Inside that overall growth, global vinyl revenue specifically rose 13.7% in 2025, more than double the industry's overall growth rate, marking its own 19th consecutive year of growth and reaching its highest level since 1983.

That last detail is worth sitting with. The US didn't have vinyl's best year since 1983 in isolation. The entire global vinyl market did, at the same time, on a growth rate more than twice as fast as the recorded music industry as a whole. A format that's supposedly a nostalgia niche has now posted growth every single year since roughly 2006 or 2007, essentially the same stretch RTS.FM has been broadcasting.

What happened to vinyl in the UK specifically?

The UK numbers, published in the BPI's 2025 year end report, are arguably the most striking single data point in this whole story. UK recorded music revenue overall rose 5% to GBP 1.57 billion in 2025, driven by streaming growth alongside physical formats. But vinyl outpaced that overall growth by a wide margin: UK vinyl revenue climbed to GBP 174.7 million, its highest level in more than three decades, up 19.9% year on year in revenue and up 13.3% year on year in units, to 7.6 million units sold. That's an 18th consecutive year of UK vinyl growth, one year behind the global streak.

Streaming still dominates UK consumption overall, accounting for 89.3% of it, so nobody's claiming vinyl is displacing digital listening. What it's doing instead is growing alongside it, on its own separate track, at a rate that outpaces the platform everyone assumed had already won.

Here's how the three headline markets stack up for 2025:

Is this growth spread evenly, or is it concentrated in a handful of releases?

This is where the "vinyl is booming for everyone" version of the story starts to complicate itself, and it's worth naming honestly rather than folding it into the celebration. A meaningful share of 2025's biggest vinyl numbers trace back to one album. IFPI named Taylor Swift's "The Life Of A Showgirl" its biggest selling album globally for 2025, with roughly 1.6 million vinyl copies sold worldwide. In the UK alone, the same release moved more than 147,000 vinyl units, the most vinyl LPs sold by a single release in a calendar year since the Official Charts Company began tracking sales in 1994, per the BPI's report. The BPI also noted that six of the UK's ten biggest selling vinyl titles of the year were released within the past two years, a sign that frontline blockbuster releases, not just decades old catalog reissues, are now doing real work in the vinyl market.

None of that erases the broader trend. Global vinyl revenue grew 13.7% and UK vinyl grew 19.9% in revenue terms, numbers far too large to be explained by one artist's release calendar alone. But it does mean the growth curve isn't uniformly distributed across every label and every genre equally. A superstar album selling over a million vinyl copies pulls enormous weight through a plant's production schedule, and that weight has to come from somewhere in the queue.

What does this mean for a small independent label trying to get a record pressed?

This is exactly the part of the story that doesn't show up in the revenue headlines, and it's the reason the global and UK numbers matter to us specifically. We wrote in detail about the mechanics of this in our earlier piece on the pressing plant capacity crisis: plants schedule around volume and standing relationships, well connected labels ordering in bulk get production slots blocked out months in advance, and a small label's one-off order for a few hundred copies is the easiest thing on the books to bump when a bigger, more predictable client needs the machine time.

Demand this broad-based, global, structural, and now running a 19th straight year, doesn't ease that pressure. It compounds it. When "The Life Of A Showgirl" alone accounts for roughly 1.6 million vinyl units worldwide, that's not an abstract statistic, it's real production capacity at real plants that a small label isn't going to be competing for on equal footing. The growth headlines and the pressing queue headlines are, in practice, the same story told from opposite ends.

It's also worth reading these numbers alongside what we found when we looked at independent labels' 44% share of the US recorded music market: owning your masters and being counted as "independent" on a chart doesn't translate automatically into leverage over physical infrastructure like pressing capacity. That's part of why vinyl-centric institutions like Kompakt in Cologne have spent decades building their own in-house manufacturing relationships rather than relying entirely on the shared queue everyone else competes for. A label without that kind of standing infrastructure is left planning its release calendar around a plant's lead time, not the other way around, and these global numbers suggest that lead time isn't shortening any time soon.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did vinyl really have its best year since 1983?

Yes, on a global basis. The IFPI's Global Music Report 2026 states that global vinyl revenue reached its highest level since 1983 in 2025, following 13.7% growth that year. The US market independently crossed $1 billion in vinyl revenue for the first time since 1983 as well, but that US milestone is one part of a wider global trend, not the whole story.

Is the UK's vinyl growth bigger than the US's?

In percentage terms, yes. UK vinyl revenue grew 19.9% year on year in 2025 according to the BPI, more than double the US's 9.3% revenue growth reported by the RIAA. The UK's GBP 174.7 million in vinyl revenue was also its highest level in more than three decades.

How much of 2025's vinyl growth came from one album?

A meaningful but not dominant share. Taylor Swift's "The Life Of A Showgirl" sold roughly 1.6 million vinyl copies worldwide and was the single biggest selling vinyl release in the UK in a calendar year since tracking began in 1994, moving over 147,000 units there alone. That's a large number, but global vinyl revenue overall grew 13.7% and UK vinyl grew 19.9% in revenue, growth rates too broad to be explained by any single release.

Does this record breaking growth make it easier for small labels to press vinyl?

Not directly, and if anything it adds to the pressure. Demand this broad-based across multiple major markets at once keeps pressing plant queues full, and plants still prioritize large, recurring orders over small one-off runs. See our earlier reporting on pressing plant capacity for how that scheduling logic actually works.

Where can I read more about who actually benefits from vinyl's growth?

Vinyl's revenue growth doesn't map cleanly onto who controls the infrastructure behind it. Our piece on independent labels' 44% US market share covers a related dynamic: independents can own a large slice of the market on paper while still depending on the same limited physical and distribution infrastructure the majors have priority access to.

Vinyl's 2025 numbers are genuinely remarkable by any measure, a 19th straight year of global growth, the UK's best vinyl year in three decades, and a US market back over $1 billion for the first time since disco was still on the charts. None of that changes the calculus for a label our size. If anything, it confirms it: demand this large and this structural isn't a temporary spike a plant can simply build its way out of. We'll keep pressing our own catalog and talking through what we learn doing it on RTS.FM's Telegram.