Survey Shows Almost Half Of Vinyl Records Go Unplayed By Their Poser Owners

With Record Store Day just around the corner — and ARIA reporting a 38% boost to vinyl sales figures over the past year — it's understandable that purveyors of the classic listening format are bullish about their purchasing prospects this Saturday.

However, it's one thing to be shifting units from shelves, but is vinyl actually as popular a platform for consuming music as sales figures would have us believe?

Possibly not, according to a new survey conducted for the BBC by market research agency ICM Unlimited, which found that nearly half of vinyl buyers don't actually play the records once they've purchased them. Breaking it down, as NME reports, this is made up of the 41 per cent of respondents who admitted that they do not use their record player in addition to a further seven per cent who don't even own a record player to use in the first place.

Of course, there's nothing really wrong with being a collector and cherishing that 'mint-in-box' glory you get with unsullied products. Besides, the majority of buyers — 52 per cent — do make use of their music, the survey suggests, and, interestingly, about half the respondents said they had first streamed an album before buying it on vinyl, which NME suggests indicates that "streaming may actually boost sales of the retro format".

With streaming revenues rising by more than 10% (over $200 million) over the past year, that's not an unlikely estimation, though the same annual figures suggest that vinyl — regardless of whether its ultimate use is as a listening or collectors' item — is doing just fine on its own.

Not sure what all the Record Store Day fuss is about? Here's why you should care about it.

For further encouragement and information, see our list of reasons why you should get out and support your local record store this weekend.