Vinyl will soon overtake CDs, new report claims – and music is now bigger than cinema

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Vinyl is now a billion-dollar business while streaming soars

A hand taking a vinyl record out of a sleeve next to a stack of CDs
(Image credit: Shutterstock / Unsplash / Brett Jordan)
  • Music report reveals revenues now higher than global box office receipts
  • The value of music sales and streaming has nearly doubled in a decade
  • Revenues are growing 11% year on year, but artists aren't profiting

Here's a pair of facts we never thought we'd see: music is now a bigger business than cinema and vinyl is about to overtake CDs. That's according to a new report by Spotify's former chief economist (via MusicRadar), who's been tracking the value of the music business for a decade.

Will Page has spent ten years calculating the value of music copyrights and performing rights, which are the rights that generate payments when music is pressed onto records, streamed over Spotify or played on the radio. And the value of those copyrights has increased from $25 billion in 2014 to $45.5 billion now.

The movie business, by comparison, is a $33.2 billion business (see below). While music has soared movies have declined: box office revenues peaked globally in 2019 at $41.9 billion.

A bar chart showing music copyright vs cinema box office

As the bar chart above shows, cinema is still struggling to recover from pandemic closures, whereas the value of music copyright has soared. That said, the comparison isn't a direct like-for-like, with live music also likely still recovering from forced closures a few years ago. (Image credit: IFPI Global Music Report, CISAC Global Collections Report, Music & Copyright and Will Page)

Music revenues aren't necessarily going to artists – most of the music money goes to multiple middlemen; not all musicians who play music wrote it, and writing music is where the most valuable copyrights are – but the report details some fascinating trends.

The vinyl revival

a record player with a vinyl

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

In the US alone, Page says, vinyl will bring in $1 billion for record labels in 2024. That means vinyl revenues are about to overtake CDs, not just in the US but globally.

There's been a shift in how music generates money too. In 2023, revenues from live music performances overtook those for public performance licensing, which is when commercial premises such as shops or hotels pay a license to play music to their patrons.

Digital streaming, unsurprisingly, is now exceeding radio and other broadcasting; the latter used to account for over 50% compared to streaming's 5%, but streaming is the bigger money maker now.

And interestingly, there's been a significant increase in "glocalization". That's where artists from around the world sing in their own languages but have big hits elsewhere. For example, Colombian artists make more money from US streaming than they do from the entire Colombian music industry.

It's fascinating stuff, and you can get your music geek on by reading the full report.

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Carrie Marshall
Carrie Marshall
Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.