Japan's Vinyl Record Output Soars Amid Pandemic

The popularity of vinyl records has been picking up globally amid the COVID pandemic and sales in the United States have surpassed those of CDs since 2020.

Photo Insert: The global revival of vinyl records is believed to have been triggered by the "Record Store Day" event first held in April 2008 in San Francisco by US record store owners.

In Japan, too, production output by value in 2021 was 11.6 times higher than a decade earlier. What is happening in the analog record market, which fell into a slump years ago? Yoshihiro Takahashi reported for Mainichi Shimbun.

According to the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), the value of annual vinyl production peaked in 1980 at about 181.2 billion yen (about $1.49 billion). As analog records began to be gradually replaced with CDs, however, production declined to some 170 million yen ($1.4 million) in 2010.

However, the figure turned upward again in 2014. It remained almost unchanged in 2020, when the COVID crisis struck, from the previous year.

Then in 2021, production volume jumped to some 1.91 million records -- about 1.7 times the previous year's figure and the highest in the past 10 years. Production value also rose to 3.9 billion yen ($32 million) -- roughly 1.8 times the figure in the previous year. The figures are thought to have been partly boosted by stay-at-home demand amid the pandemic.

The global revival of vinyl records is believed to have been triggered by the "Record Store Day" event first held in April 2008 in San Francisco by US record store owners. They organized the event in a bid to revitalize independent record stores that had suffered a blow due to the digitalization of music. They sold limited numbers of analog records by artists who cooperated in the event.

Though only about 10 vinyl titles were sold in the inaugural year, works by big names such as Bob Dylan were added from the second year onward, boosting the number of works and event locations.

In 2020, the Record Store Day event was held in 23 countries including Japan, spurring renewed recognition of the appeal of records. In the United States, record sales climbed to $644 million in 2020 -- up some 30% from the previous year -- topping CD sales for the first time in 34 years. In 2021, the number of records sold also grew 1.5 times from the previous year to 41.72 million records, surpassing the number of CDs.

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