Vinyl Just Booked Its 19th Straight Year of Growth. Almost None of It Reaches a Turntable.

The format war is over and the strangest thing happened: both sides won, and neither one is using the trophy.

The RIAA's 2025 year-end numbers put US vinyl revenue at 1.04 billion dollars, up 9.3 percent. That is the 19th consecutive year of growth and the first time the format has cleared a billion dollars since 1983, back when records still made up nearly half of all recorded-music revenue. Vinyl moved 46.8 million units against 29.5 million CDs, more than triple the revenue, and the US on its own now accounts for close to half the format's value worldwide. By every chart, vinyl won.

If vinyl won, why is nobody playing it?

Because the records are not really being played. Industry analysts estimate that around 40 percent of US record buyers do not own anything to play them on. The album has quietly become an object: a poster you can hold, a token of fandom, decor rotated by season. That is a perfectly good reason to spend money, but it is not the romance the vinyl revival sells itself on. The story is crate-digging and warm low end. The reality, for a large slice of buyers, is a sealed sleeve on a shelf.

Now look at the other end of the same culture. Walk into any club on earth and watch the booth. The overwhelming majority of working DJs are playing off a USB stick into a CDJ. The people who buy the records mostly do not spin them, and the people who spin for a living mostly do not buy the records. The format war did not produce a winner. It produced two separate rooms that no longer talk to each other.

Does vinyl-only culture still gatekeep?

This is where the warm nostalgia gets cold fast. Vinyl-only releases, records pressed with no digital version, keep reigniting the elitism charge, and the math is not subtle. An EP runs around 10 pounds, double or triple the digital price, and limited pressings resell on Discogs for several times that. For a 22-year-old trying to build a record bag on a tight budget, in a city where rent already eats most of the paycheck, a vinyl-only policy is not curation. It is a velvet rope.

Rich kids are the death of culture, one label boss put it. Wealth makes the playing field uneven.

Label owners feel the contradiction themselves. One concedes there is a gatekeeper element, that charging 10 pounds is exclusive to some degree, even while arguing the opposite case: when the music becomes for everybody, it is also for nobody in particular, and nobody pays for what they do not value. Both things are true, which is exactly why the fight never ends. The compromise some labels reached, vinyl first and a digital release once the pressing sells out, is the only honest answer on the table: reward the collector without locking out the broke kid who can actually rock a room.

So who actually won the format war?

Nobody, and that is the useful conclusion. Vinyl won the revenue and the romance. USB won the dancefloor. The collector and the working DJ are now two different people with two different relationships to the same music, and pretending otherwise is how the elitism keeps regenerating. The record-store counter and the CDJ are both legitimate. The damage is done only when one is used to decide who counts as real.