Vinyl Passed a Billion Dollars in 2025, and the Pressing Plants Still Can't Catch Up

A first pressing preorder placed today at a mid-sized indie label will not ship for six to nine months, sometimes longer if the plant is small or the artist has no label muscle behind them. That wait has become normal, and it is the strange underside of a genuine boom: in 2025, vinyl records generated more than a billion dollars in US revenue for the first time in more than four decades.

According to the RIAA’s 2025 year-end report, vinyl revenue reached $1.04 billion, up 9.3 percent from the year before, marking the format’s 19th consecutive year of growth. US sales now account for close to half of vinyl’s entire global value. Vinyl did not just grow, it dominated its own physical category: 46.8 million LPs were sold against 29.5 million CDs, more than three times the revenue, while CD sales fell 11.6 percent to $312.4 million.

The reversal of CDs and vinyl is not a nostalgia footnote anymore, it is the physical format market. The harder question is why supply has not caught up with a trend that has now run for nearly two decades.

The Billion-Dollar Milestone, In Context

A billion dollars is still a sliver of the $11.5 billion in total US recorded music revenue the RIAA reported for 2025, most of which comes from paid streaming subscriptions. But physical formats carry a different kind of weight for labels: margins on a $30 to $40 LP are far higher than the fractions of a cent per stream, and vinyl buyers tend to be repeat, high-spend customers rather than casual listeners.

That combination, real money plus loyal buyers, is what has kept labels chasing vinyl capacity even as the format remains a rounding error next to streaming.

Who Is Actually Buying Records

The buyer profile has shifted from what most people assume. Vinyl Alliance, the industry group tracking format trends, now describes Gen Z as the driving force behind the category, and Futuresource Consulting’s Audio Tech Lifestyles research backs that up: about 60 percent of Gen Z respondents say they buy records, 76 percent of Gen Z vinyl fans buy at least monthly, and 80 percent own a turntable.

That is a younger audience than the format’s reputation suggests, and their reasons are not purely sonic. Some Gen Z buyers point to it as a way to own something physical in a catalog they otherwise stream, others cite it as decor. Millennials remain a strong secondary market: around 42 percent say they favor vinyl for its tactile and nostalgic qualities, and as a demographic in its prime earning years, that group spends more per visit than younger collectors do.

Record Store Day, the twice-yearly event built around limited exclusive pressings at independent shops, is the clearest snapshot of who actually shows up in person. Luminate’s data on RSD week 2025 found more than 553,000 exclusive RSD albums sold, plus another 120,000 exclusive singles, and put 46 percent of RSD shoppers under the age of 35, with 16 percent between 13 and 17. That is not a crowd of collectors reliving their youth, it is largely a crowd discovering the format for the first time.

Why the Pressing Plants Can’t Keep Up

Lead times of six to nine months are now standard industry-wide, and independent artists without a major label’s priority slots often wait closer to a year. Coverage from Grammy.com and trade press attributes the backlog to a stack of compounding problems: PVC resin shortages and higher raw material costs, aging manufacturing equipment that was never built for current volumes, and a global plant network that grew at pandemic-era pace while demand kept climbing at 7 to 11 percent a year.

Plants report running near 85 percent of nominal capacity, but once maintenance downtime and the changeover time between different jobs are factored in, the real slack for new orders is thin. The industry has started building new capacity to catch up: GZ Media, the Czech company that presses records for much of the world, opened Nashville Record Pressing, a $13.3 million facility rated for more than 20 million records a year, specifically to serve North American demand without a transatlantic shipping delay on top of the production wait.

What the Bottleneck Means for the Format

The mismatch between demand and capacity is unusual for a format that industry watchers keep predicting will plateau. Instead, both sides of the equation are still climbing: the market is worth roughly $2.4 billion globally and analysts project it could reach $3.5 to $5 billion by the early 2030s, while pressing capacity additions have consistently lagged a year or two behind the order backlog.

For an artist or small label, the practical consequence is that vinyl now has to be planned like a physical product with a real supply chain, not an afterthought bolted onto a release date. Presses booked at album announcement, not album completion, are the difference between having stock at the show and telling fans it is still in transit.

There is also a margin story underneath the supply story that explains why labels keep pushing pressing capacity rather than walking away from a format with such long lead times. A vinyl LP retailing at $30 to $40 carries a per-unit profit that no combination of streams can match on a per-listener basis, and repeat vinyl buyers, the kind who show up for Record Store Day twice a year, tend to also stream the same artist’s catalog the rest of the time. The format is not replacing streaming revenue, it is layered on top of it, which is exactly why a nine-month wait has not been enough to make labels give up on expanding capacity.