Streaming Has Won, So Why Are Turntables Thriving?

The counterintuitive economics of vinyl's revival, and what it tells us about ownership, ritual and the objects we keep

Analog Soundware Business Lab for audiophiles, collectors, audio designers and restorers

I want to begin with a concession, because I think any honest discussion of vinyl has to start there.

Streaming has won.

Not in the grudging, technically true sense that people sometimes use to change the subject, but decisively and by any measure the industry itself uses. The British Phonographic Industry's figures for 2025 make that plain. BPI analysis of Official Charts Company data shows the UK's annual audio streaming total passed 200 billion streams for the first time, reaching 210.3 billion, and streaming rose 5.5% year-on-year to account for a record 89.3% of consumption, up from 88.8% in 2024.

Nine out of ten listening now happens on a service rather than a shelf.

And yet in the same report, released in the same week, sits a line that ought to look strange to anyone approaching the market from first principles. Sales of vinyl LPs rose for an 18th consecutive year, which kept physical formats as a whole in growth for the second year running, up 1.4% overall. The vinyl market grew 13.3% year-on-year to 7.6 million units, compared with 9.1% annual growth in 2024. Measured in money rather than units, the picture is sharper still: according to the BPI's annual report, UK spending on vinyl reached £174.4 million in 2025, a 19.9% rise on the previous year and a level not seen in over 30 years.

So, we have a format that is slower, more expensive, more fragile and, in several measurable respects, technically less capable than the service most people already pay for, and it is growing faster than that service.

Why are turntables thriving? I have spent a long time around turntables, tonearms and the people who obsess over them, and I do not think the usual explanations quite cover it. Nostalgia does not. Sound quality, on its own, does not either. What follows is my attempt to think through what does.

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First, a note on the numbers themselves

Before interpreting a statistic, it is worth being precise about what it actually says, partly because the "18 consecutive years" figure is often repeated without its context.

The run of growth is counted in units, and it starts from a very low base. Music Week notes that 7.6 million units represents a more than 30-fold increase on the size of the market when it returned to growth in 2008. That is a remarkable recovery, but a 30-fold rise from near-extinction still leaves vinyl as a small slice of total listening.

It is also worth noticing that the BPI's own framing of the revenue story uses a slightly different count. The organisation describes vinyl as having grown in revenue for 16 consecutive years, to the point where an expanding vinyl market has become something of the norm.

Both figures are accurate. They simply measure different things, and I mention the distinction because this is a subject where the headline tends to travel faster than the footnote.

The second thing worth stating clearly is that vinyl's growth is not happening at streaming's expense. The two are rising together. That, to my mind, is the most interesting fact in the whole story, and it rules out the simplest reading of the revival as a rejection of digital life.

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The sound quality question

In a website like Analog Soundware, it would be easy to settle the matter by declaring that records simply sound better. I do not think that holds up as a general explanation, and I do not think our readers would thank me for pretending it does.

The streaming services have closed most of the fidelity argument that once existed. Spotify announced on 10 September 2025 the rollout of lossless streaming for Premium subscribers, at up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC, across more than 50 markets through October, and the United Kingdom was among the markets in the initial rollout phase. It included lossless in the existing Premium subscription, putting it in direct competition with Apple Music, which has offered lossless streaming since 2021. For most UK listeners, then, bit-accurate digital playback is now part of a standard monthly subscription.

Anyone who has set up a turntable knows the medium's inherent compromises such as surface noise, inner-groove distortion, the sensitivity to setup, the gradual wear that every play imposes etc. None of this means a well-pressed record on a well-set-up deck cannot be deeply satisfying. Many of us find it so, and there are real discussable reasons why a particular mastering or pressing might appeal to a listener more than a particular digital release. But "more satisfying to me" and "objectively higher fidelity" are different claims and conflating them does not help anyone think clearly.

There is also a simpler reason to doubt that sound quality is the main driver.

 A meaningful share of buyers may not be listening to their records much at all.

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Buying music you don't play

In 2016, a poll by ICM, reported by the BBC, produced a figure that caused a small stir. It found that 48% of people who had bought vinyl in the previous month had yet to play the record; 7% said they didn't own a turntable, and a further 41% said they had one but didn't use it. One student told BBC News that the records in his room were more for decor than for playing.

It is easy to read that with a raised eyebrow. I would suggest resisting the urge. The survey is now a decade old and captured a single moment, so I would not lean on its exact percentages today. But the behaviour it points to is real and recurs in later research. When IFPI asked vinyl buyers across 22 countries for their main reason for buying, in its 2022 Engaging with Music report, wanting to physically own the music was the most-cited answer, followed closely by liking to have physical records to look at, both of which are possible without a record player.

Once you accept that people are often buying the record as something other than a playback device, the economics stop looking irrational. They look like a different transaction altogether.

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Discover on digital, collect on vinyl

The same 2016 research contained a detail that I think was more revealing than the headline. Nearly half of vinyl buyers, 45%, said they had listened to the record on a streaming service before buying the physical copy. Geoff Taylor, then chief executive of the BPI, summed up the pattern neatly. Younger fans "discover on digital, but collect on vinyl." He added that they value the immediacy and convenience of streaming services but still want to own and collect albums by artists they love.

This reframes the relationship. Streaming works as the world's largest listening booth: frictionless, endless and nearly free at the margin. The record is what you buy after the booth has done its work, once a piece of music has earned a place in your life. Seen that way, the two formats are not competitors. They sit at different stages of the same relationship with an artist.

The 2025 charts support this reading, and they also complicate the assumption that the revival is mainly about older listeners reliving their youth. Of the ten best-selling vinyl albums of the year, seven were new releases rather than back catalogue reissues, and Taylor Swift's The Life of a Showgirl sold more than 147,000 units on the format. That was the most vinyl LPs sold for a single release in a calendar year since the Official Charts Company launched in 1994. Nostalgia still plays a role, of course; anniversary pressings of (What's the Story) Morning Glory? and Definitely Maybe put Oasis in the top ten twice. But a format driven by nostalgia alone would not be led by records released in the past year.

Why a physical copy feels worth more

If the record is partly a statement of attachment, the psychology of ownership becomes the more useful lens, and there is solid research here.

In a 2018 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, Ozgun Atasoy and Carey Morewedge set out to test something many of us intuitively believe. Across five experiments, participants placed less value on digital versions of the same good than on physical ones, paying more for, being willing to pay more for, and being more likely to buy physical souvenir photographs, books and films. The mechanism they identified is what psychologists call psychological ownership. Physical goods more readily become associated with the self, and differences in that sense of ownership accounted for the difference in value.

The route to that sense of ownership is, quite literally, the hands. The authors argue that because physical goods can be touched, handled and moved in ways digital goods cannot, they have a critical advantage in generating psychological ownership. In one experiment, participants showed stronger purchase intentions for a physical copy of The Empire Strikes Back than a digital one, but only when they considered the Star Wars series relevant to their identity.

That condition matters. It suggests that the premium we place on a physical object is not uniform. It grows with how much the content means to us. A streaming subscription gives me access to almost everything, but access is not the same as ownership, and it certainly is not the same as identity. A record on my shelf is a small public statement that this particular music is part of who I am. A playlist can say that too, but it does not take up space in a room, and I suspect that is part of the point.

The ritual is not a side effect

Then there is the act of playing a record, which people outside the hobby often describe as the price you pay for vinyl, and people inside it often describe as the reward.

Consider the sequence. Choosing a sleeve, sliding out the inner, holding the disc by its edges, cleaning it, lowering the stylus, sitting down. Twenty minutes later, getting up again to turn it over. None of these steps is necessary for hearing music in 2026. Every one of them is, in the language of economics.

Research on rituals suggests that friction of this particular kind may not be neutral. In a 2013 study in Psychological Science, Kathleen Vohs, Yajin Wang, Francesca Gino and Michael Norton tested whether rituals change the experience that follows them. Participants who performed a ritual before eating chocolate rated it as more flavourful, more valuable and more worth savouring than those who did not; random gestures did not produce the same effect, and a delay between the ritual and consumption heightened enjoyment. A further experiment found that performing a ritual yourself enhanced the experience more than watching someone else perform it, suggesting personal involvement is essential. The researchers' explanation was straightforward. Rituals appear to improve consumption because they lead to greater involvement and interest.

I want to be careful not to overstate this. The study involved chocolate, lemonade and carrots, not records, and I am not aware of equivalent experimental work on playing vinyl specifically. But the parallel is hard to ignore. The turntable asks for the three ingredients the study identified, a fixed sequence of actions, a short delay before the reward, and hands-on involvement by the listener. It is at least plausible that the same mechanism is part of why an album heard this way can feel more present than the identical recording started from a phone.

There is a related point that anyone who has played records for years will recognise. A 20-minute side resists skipping. You tend to hear an album in the order the artist intended, and you tend to listen rather than simply hear. Streaming makes attention optional. Vinyl, gently but insistently, makes it the default.

What the industry has understood

The labels have not been slow to notice any of this. They have responded to demand by releasing exclusive colour variants and collector bundles, increasingly treating vinyl as a premium product for dedicated supporters.

I will admit to mixed feelings here, and I suspect many readers share them. On one hand, it is good that artists and labels have found a way for listeners to pay something closer to what music is worth to them. It is healthy for pressing plants, independent shops and the whole analogue ecosystem. On the other hand, when a record is designed to be bought in several colours by the same fan, it is reasonable to ask whether we are still talking about a listening format or a merchandise category that happens to have a groove cut into it. I do not think that question has a single answer, and I would rather leave it open than pretend it is answered.

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So, what does this tell us?

Pulling these threads together, I have come to think the vinyl revival is not really a puzzle about audio at all. It is a demonstration that when a medium becomes abundant, frictionless and effectively free at the point of use, something else becomes scarce, a sense of ownership, a sense of occasion and a reason to pay full attention.

Streaming solved the problem of access so completely that it created room for a different product to exist alongside it. The record is not competing to be the most efficient way to hear a song; that contest was lost decades ago. It competes on meaning, on commitment, and on the pleasure of doing something deliberately.

For those of us who care about analogue playback, I think this should prompt a little reflection rather than celebration.

If the growth is driven largely by ownership and ritual, then the sound argument we tend to lead with may matter less to newcomers than we assume, and the best way to welcome them might be to talk less about superiority and more about experience. And for anyone sceptical of the whole phenomenon, the research offers a fair challenge in return before dismissing people who pay a premium for a less convenient format, it is worth asking whether convenience was ever the only thing we valued in music.

Eighteen years of growth suggest it was not. The more interesting question, and the one I would encourage readers to sit with, is what else in our increasingly weightless lives might be quietly waiting for the same reconsideration.

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Source notes: UK market data comes from the BPI's 2025 year-end figures (as reported by the BPI, Music Week, Billboard and Dork) and Official Charts Company data; the 2016 buyer survey is ICM's poll for the BBC; the global buyer motivations are from IFPI's 2022 Engaging with Music report; the psychology research is Atasoy & Morewedge (2018) and Vohs et al. (2013).

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The author has no commercial relationships with any company mentioned in this article. Views expressed are the author's own. Correspondence and disagreement are equally welcome.