The vinyl market in Italy

The term vinyl refers to a medium that serves or store and play sounds. Vinyl, also called a vinyl record, in order to listen to it is used with a turntable, a special instrument connected to an amplifier that can spread the sound. Vinyl records differ in the speed at which they travel, understood as rotations per minute on the turntable. The most common vinyls are 78, 45 and 33 rpm and differ from each other in terms of sound quality, record size and cylinder strength.

As for the global market, this was valued at $179 million in 2019 and is expected to reach $481.5 million in 2026, growing at a CAGR of 15.0% between the year 2021 and 2026. The most thriving market in global terms is the U.S. market where vinyl album revenues account for 62% of total physical media revenues.

The Italian market data do not differ much from the American market. in fact, vinyl is back in fashion as an object symbolic of a certain timeless music culture. Vinyl sales between the year 2016 and 2017, while not surpassing CD sales, increased by 50 percent to generate revenue in 2017 of 13 million euros as reported by Eurispes' Italy 2019 Report. The overtaking with CD for the first time since 1991 occurred in 2020 when vinyl sales grew 121 percent over the previous year while CD suffered a 6 percent loss.

This burgeoning market trend, despite the pandemic period, is mainly due to the e-commerce market where a wide and diverse vinyl offering can be found. In addition, in the recent period a major factor in this growth has been the re-release of historic albums such as Abbey Road, by The Beatles on vinyl.