Among the dwindling number of hip-hop and R&B superstars, Kendrick Lamar is one of the few whose fans can count on the availability of official vinyl releases. CDs have become an afterthought vinyl has become a rare extra. And all of them and many others have been skipped over for official vinyl versions. Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, meanwhile, curried an influx of subscriptions for Jay Z’s Tidal as that service’s biggest exclusive to date.Īll of these have been cumbersome, event-like album releases exactly because of their platform association, banner albums by virtue of an exclusive banner.
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In many ways, mainstream hip-hop has traded record sales for platform exclusivity and streaming numbers as an outward barometer of success.This year alone, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Chance The Rapper’s Coloring Book, and Drake’s Views have all at one point been funnelled exclusively through Apple Music or iTunes.
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Unlike vinyl sales, the increased rates of streaming are spearheaded by hip-hop and R&B specifically, which if taken as a single genre, is the most popularly streamed of all. By contrast, downloads and streams now account for more than 75% of the music industry’s total revenue, an enormous surge largely attributable to new paid subscriptions for services like Apple Music and Spotify. In 2015 vinyl sales accounted for 5% of all albums sold in the U.S., a relative but undeniable success. And even though large-scale pressings-runs in the many thousands of copies instead of the hundreds-present big labels with attractive scalability, majors have apparently diverted their investment in physical retail hip-hop albums towards digital retail and streaming, both of which dovetail with the genre’s perpetually young, mobile-obsessed audience. So why aren’t major record labels pressing vinyl versions of their most popular rap albums? And how are bootleggers getting away with filling this void?ĭespite the guaranteed demand, manufacturing vinyl remains an expensive and complicated prospect. But unlike Taylor Swift’s 1989 or Adele’s 25 (the latter of which pushed a boggling 116,000 vinyl copies in 2015) mainstream albums from hip-hop’s biggest stars are rarely making their way to vinyl at all. Independent music has been the source of much of vinyl’s recent growth, and, like any other genre, indie hip-hop has returned (and stuck) to the format. Pop stars and repolished dad records aside, successful indie acts like Sufjan Stevens, Alabama Shakes, and the Arctic Monkeys account for the rest of the list.īut as vinyl sales continue to swell (albeit with some cooling this year), there’s been a glaring omission in the uptick: mainstream hip-hop, a genre excelling just about everywhere else, and one with unmatched roots in vinyl itself. Still, in 2015, the two best vinyl sellers were records released by Adele and Taylor Swift, whose albums were indeed the most popular by almost any other measure as well.
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A large chunk of last year’s top ten sellers, for example, was carved out by perennial reissues from the likes of Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, and The Beatles, classics benefiting from a regenerated association with vinyl. Unsurprisingly, the best-selling records only barely correspond with popular contemporary music, an artifact of the format’s built-in niche appeal. Last year, sealing a decade of growth, vinyl record sales grew 30% to nearly 12 million units sold in the United States alone, an increased but single digit portion of overall album sales. Bootlegs rule in a world where vinyl isn’t king.