What Are the Top Physical Album Sales of 2023 So Far? The music industry’s top physical sales of 2023 so far have been revealed per data from Luminate, further highlighting the relationship between K-pop fans and physical music sales. While streaming continues to dominate as the most popular music consumption method, physical sales are also up across all formats — and super fans are helping to drive those numbers, according to mid-year data from Luminate. Luminate defines a super fan as a music listener aged 13+ who engages with an artist and their content in multiple ways — streaming, social media, purchasing physical merch or music, or attending live performances. In this case, super fans were participants who self-reported as engaging with their favorite artists in five or more ways. In the US, super fans account for 15% of the population, and they influence an artist’s relationship with their listeners. Fans who buy physical music in the form of CDs, cassettes, or vinyl are 128% more likely to be super fans, and they spend 80% more money on music each month than the average listener.
Bristol, UK | Is it possible to visit every record store in Bristol in 8 hours? Nathan Simm AKA Simma is the Yorkshire-based DJ/Producer and founder of Dub Junction record label. When performing in Bristol earlier this year, the producer decided to see if he can visit every record shop in the city in one day. Beginning his day at Collector Cave on Cheltenham Road and ending it at Friendly Records in Bedminster, Nathan travelled around the city to get to all 14 stores. “I’ve always thought that the best way of exploring a city is to plot a route to visit record shops in all the different districts as this typically takes you through lots of interesting locations,” Nathan tells Bristol24/7. “It’s often off the beaten track, filled with creative people happy to welcome you to their hometown.” “Bristol is definitely a goldmine when it comes to vinyl record digging, with so many top-quality shops all within walking distance of each other.” Nathan explains.
Norwich, UK | Norwich’s Dirt record shop to close as it hunts new home: A city record shop which opened in January is to close at the end of this month as it hunts for a bigger home. Punk specialists Dirt opened in Magdalen Street in a small shop under the flyover at the start of the year, but will leave its current home at the end of its lease and search for bigger premises where it can display all of its stock. The shop was opened by Mark Blenkiron, who worked in Piccadilly Circus’s legendary Tower Records during the 1980s and also ran his own record label and radio station, sells vinyl records and CDs as well as a wide range of band t-shirts. Bosses are hoping to stay in the NR3 area and to open the new store in the coming months, after acquiring a large assortment of new stock. When opening the shop at the start of the year Mr Blenkiron said: “We’ve been pretty busy almost every day we’ve been open so far. “I’m hoping we can give people something they can’t get elsewhere.”
Grand Rapids, MI | Grand Rapids studio wants to help indie bands get their music onto vinyl: The owner of a Grand Rapids-based recording and audio production studio plans to begin producing short-run vinyl albums, offering artists a new way to get physical copies of their music into the hands of fans. With a background in audio production for live musical events, George Paulin worked as an audio engineer in Chicago and moved last year to West Michigan, where he opened Grand Rapids Voice Over from his home. Paulin recently invested about $3,500 to buy a T560 vinyl record-cutting lathe, which will allow his company to produce lathe-cut albums by hand, one by one. “It’s a very fragile art,” Paulin told Crain’s Grand Rapids Business. “A hand-cut record cannot be exact every single time, like a pressed record. Because of that, hand-cut records are seen as a rare and sought-after thing. There’s less of them and they’re all unique.”
Arcadia, CA | Onyx Record Press is the brainchild of LA techno artist Drumcell: Los Angeles DJ and producer Drumcell is starting a vinyl pressing plant. Located in the city of Arcadia, Los Angeles County, Onyx Record Press is expected to begin pressing in August and is already taking pre-orders. “We believe in investing in our music communities by prioritising non-major labels and artists, creating access for customers that are faced with unrealistic timelines or flat out denied, and having new state-of-the-art pressing machines for a quicker turnaround,” Drumcell said in a statement yesterday, July 17th. He continued: “Our team has over 25 years of experience in the vinyl manufacturing industry. We uphold the notion that getting records pressed is a distinguished compliment for an artist. We believe that the sum of feeling the weight of vinyl in your hands, listening to the needle translate the grooves into music and admiring the large artwork is the ultimate form to experience recorded music.”
Blur and Smiths producer Stephen Street champions the CD format – and says bands might need them with the cost and time of pressing vinyl going up. Can we have the best of both worlds with album packages? Blur and Smiths producer Stephen Street recently stopped by as a guest on Cambridge Audio’s Made By Music podcast, but despite his landmark work with indie artists coming in the heyday of the compact disc format in the ’80s and ’90s, we weren’t expecting him to come out championing CDs in 2023. “I still love CDs and I still buy CDs,” said Street. “I think CDs are going to be a format that a lot of the indie bands are going to have to go back to because they can’t afford to get their records put on vinyl anymore.” This is an interesting point – and we’ve already seen cassettes make a return as a collectible item for fans who want to support bands. But unlike tape, CD offers a genuinely superior format to the admittedly more practical quality of streaming. A lot of listeners don’t know what they’re missing. “I think if people actually bother to compare a CD to a stream they’ll actually remember how much better CDs sound,” Street added.
Does artwork still matter? Pre-mp3, iPod and smartphone, the visual culture of recorded music were all important to delivering music. But in an age where music is less tactile, and widely consumed more passively, does artwork design still matter? Music today is easily listenable on your personal portable digital device of choice. Gone are the days of clumsy cassette tapes, delicate CDs, or heavy vinyl. Good bandwidth, decent hard disk space, and a user interface are all that are needed for a satisfying listening experience. It’s as intuitive as dropping a needle into a groove or slotting in a cassette or CD. We might reasonably expect, therefore, that accompanying visual design for music would be on the decline, which would be a shame. For many fans and musicians, the artwork might be their first thought. Covers such as Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’, The Beatle’s Sgt Peppers’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or, closer to this publication, Burial’s ‘Untrue’ are deeply entwined in people’s music appreciation.
Why ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ still matters at 50, and not just to dads: Pink Floyd’s masterpiece maintains a cross-generational appeal that has made it among the best-selling albums of all time. You lower a record player’s stylus onto an LP, and it begins. The crackle of needle on vinyl is silenced by a long, low heartbeat fading in and then a maelstrom of sound that serves as overture for the (dis)passion play to come. Perhaps the record player is illuminated by the light of the nearby lava lamp your sister gave you when she left for college. Perhaps the Snoopy and R. Crumb posters on your wall are obscured by clouds of smoke from the bong cradled in your best friend’s lap. The maelstrom builds and swirls like the Aleph in that Borges short story your hip English teacher assigned the class, and then—whammo—the album’s soundscape widens into 3D Technicolor CinemaScope, and a weary Godlike singer arrives to remind you to “Breathe … Breathe in the air.” It’s 1973, you’re 15 years old, and you’re listening to “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
