CES 2014

The 2014 International CES opened yesterday, with attendance down due to the extremely cold weather conditions gripping the nation, but among vinyl fans warm feelings prevailed as sales were the highest in 2013 since the 1991 debut of Soundscan. And it can be argued that Soundscan barely "scratches the surface" of actual record sales.

In fact, Analogplanet is in the midst of compiling the number of records pressed worldwide at the major pressing plants. We are waiting for a few "stragglers" who promised to provide numbers soon. Soundscan puts the number of 6 million. The Czech plant GZ Media alone says it pressed in excess of 7 million records in 2013 and while it can be argued that pressed records aren't the same as sold records, plants are only pressing what is being ordered and what is being ordered is usually what labels expect to sell and labels are not in the business of amassing large, unsold inventories.

Meanwhile sales of CDs continued to plunge in 2013 and even digital downloads saw a sales decrease last year as more and more "fast food" music lovers chose to gorge themselves on low quality, high content streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and the others.

That leaves vinyl as the only music medium to show a sales increase in 2013 and it was a large one compared to 2012.