U.S. vinyl sales topped $1 billion in 2025, the format’s first time crossing that mark since 1983, according to the RIAA’s official year-end revenue report. Vinyl LPs generated just over $1 billion in revenue on 46.8 million units sold, up from 43.4 million units in 2024.

The RIAA’s data, also detailed in The Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of the report, puts vinyl’s year-over-year growth at 9.3%, extending a recovery that the RIAA says has now run for 19 consecutive years.

Key Points

• U.S. vinyl revenue exceeded $1 billion in 2025, the first time since 1983
• 46.8 million vinyl units sold in 2025, up from 43.4 million in 2024, a 9.3% increase
• Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” was the top-selling vinyl LP of 2025, moving 1.6 million copies
• Swift has held the top-selling vinyl album spot for four consecutive years
• Average vinyl LP price hit $37.22 in 2025, up 24% from roughly $30 in 2020
• Total 2025 U.S. recorded music revenue reached $11.5 billion, an industry record, with streaming still dominant at $9.47 billion

Vinyl’s 1983 comparison point is a meaningful one: that year sits near the format’s last commercial peak before cassettes and then CDs pushed records out of the mainstream for two decades. The RIAA’s own sales database shows vinyl revenue bottoming out in the 2000s before a slow climb back began in the late 2000s, a recovery that has now compounded for nearly two decades straight.

Swift’s dominance of the format has become its own annual data point. “The Life of a Showgirl” moving 1.6 million vinyl copies on its own is a substantial share of the format’s total 46.8 million units, and her run atop the format’s year-end charts for four straight years underscores how much of vinyl’s current revenue is concentrated around a handful of superstar releases rather than spread evenly across catalog and independent titles.

Rising prices are doing real work in vinyl’s revenue growth alongside unit sales. A jump from roughly $30 to $37.22 average price in five years outpaces general inflation over the same period, reflecting both higher production costs and labels leaning into vinyl as a premium, collectible format rather than a mass-market one.

Vinyl still represents a modest slice of the industry’s overall $11.5 billion haul, with streaming subscriptions and ad-supported platforms accounting for the large majority of revenue. But for a format once written off as a relic, crossing the billion-dollar mark for the first time in 42 years is a real milestone, one that suggests the resurgence long treated as a niche nostalgia trend has become a durable, if smaller, pillar of how the recorded music business makes money.