CD and cassette sales also saw sizable bumps across the marketplace.
Overall sales of physical music on online music marketplace Discogs saw a 40.12% increase in 2020 over the year prior, the company reported today in its year-end wrap up, with a total of 16.29 million pieces of physical music -- vinyl records, CDs and cassettes -- sold. The total number of orders, at 8.85 million, jumped 35.78% over the year prior.
Unsurprisingly, as sales of it the format have been growing across the board for more than a decade, vinyl led the way in terms of popular formats on the marketplace. Just shy of 12 million records -- 11,961,998 is the exact figure -- changed hands, a 40.75% bump over the year prior. That number accounts for around 75% of the sales volume on the platform, and is the first time the raw figures passed 10 million (last year’s total was 8.5 million). CDs also saw a sizable jump in sales, up 37.14% to 3.44 million, while cassette sales were up by a third, to 282,798.