Taylor Swift's 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl has reached 1.6 million in vinyl sales alone, with eight different LP variants. Photo / Supplied
Taylor Swift's 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl has reached 1.6 million in vinyl sales alone, with eight different LP variants. Photo / Supplied
US vinyl sales have topped US$1 billion for the first time since 1983 thanks to the “Taylor Swift effect”.
Sales of the once niche musical medium have been rising for 19 years straight but have ratcheted up thanks to the not-so-niche artist.
Swift’s 2025 album The Life of a Showgirlsold 1.6 million in vinyl sales alone. The album had eight different vinyl LP variants, with superfans purchasing all eight.
Some editions had a poem by Swift, others had unseen photos, a few were only available for 48 hours through her website.
The Recording Industry Association of America’s annual report showed vinyl purchases reached US$1.04b ($1.77b) in 2025 – a 9.3% increase on the year prior.
Although vinyl has been rising over the years, “the explosive resurgence of vinyl has been led by Taylor Swift’s canny marketing of the format as a collectible”, said the Guardian’s Owen Myers.
Including the various CDs and cassettes, The Life of a Showgirl had 34 variants of the same album.
Fans gather for the Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department album release at Real Groovy in Auckland. Photo / Alex Burton
Official Aotearoa Music Charts top 40 vinyl albums from 2003 to 2025 had Swift’s 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department at number one.
She also had two other albums in the top 10, racking up six albums in total over the top 40.
Music critic and self-described “internet’s busiest music nerd” Anthony Fantano said Swift was cashing in rather than offering a worthwhile product.
“Are you really giving your fans what they want, or are you merely exploiting a very weird niche monopoly that you have over a certain market of fans who are basically going to shell money out for anything you physically drop?” he said in a YouTube video titled “Taylor Swift is Still Ruining Vinyl”.
Nearly 50% of all sales of vinyl were to American customers and the format dominated physical sales, selling 46.8 million units versus 29.5 million last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
The continued rise of vinyl has even brought production back to New Zealand shores.
The country’s only record pressing plant, EMI in Lower Hutt, closed in September 1987, citing falling interest due to rising CD and cassette sales, according to Audio Culture.
Production lines were silent until 2018 when Ben Wallace and Joel Woods started Holiday Records, based in Auckland Central.
Holiday Records co-founder Joel Woods pouring virgin vinyl pellets. Photo / Supplied
“The industry worldwide is booming and every manufacturer, like us, is experiencing the same demand,” Woods told the Herald in 2023.
“CDs have died out and vinyl record sales have come alive,” he said.
