Andrew Paul is Popular Science‘s staff writer covering tech news. Previously, he was a regular contributor to The A.V. Club and Input, and has had recent work featured by Rolling Stone, Fangoria, GQ, Slate, NBC, as well as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives outside Indianapolis.
Somehow, someway, vinyl records keep defying the odds. Despite falling firmly behind compact disc sales for decades, the vintage physical music medium returned to the top spot in 2022 for the first time since 1987. Now, new numbers released by the Recording Industry Association of America indicate that wasn’t just a random fluke—yet again, vinyl outsold CDs for a second year running in 2023. This time, however, LPs managed to widen the lead even more.
But what's more impressive to consider is that new vinyl is usually much more expensive to manufacture than compact discs. After spending decades as listeners’ go-to physical music medium, vinyl records finally passed the torch over to CDs back in 1987. For the next 35 years, that dynamic remained the same, with CDs' comparative portability, durability, and overall audio quality making them the preferred method of enjoying music. Sorry record purists, but it’s science.
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