UK’s Tesco Chain Expanding Vinyl LP Trial Sales for Holiday Selling Season

Friday announcement. Tesco will expand its vinyl-LP range to 20 titles, including the new Coldplay release, A Head Full of Dreams and “all-time classics” like Sticky Fingers from the Rolling Stones, it said. “The move is significant as in the last few years the vinyl album revival has been gaining momentum, year on year with sales up by more than 50 per cent in 2014,” the chain said, citing British Phonographic Industry data. Tesco’s trial of Iron Maiden’s triple-LP vinyl album “was a real success with all our stock selling out and this really proved to us just how popular the vinyl album format is again with music fans,” the chain said. “Vinyl is definitely coming back with demand growing stronger year by year and we think there will be a big demand in the UK this Christmas as music fans look for trendy gifting options.” Vinyl albums “have bucked the downward sales trend” in physical music sales, it said, citing BPI 2014 data that music CD sales fell 6.5 percent and music downloads declined by nearly 9 percent. Besides vinyl LPs, streaming, which grew by 78 percent last year from a year earlier, is the “only other music format” experiencing sales growth in the U.K., Tesco said. To support the vinyl sales trend, Tesco began selling turntables last Christmas and “demand has been so strong that it now stocks 12 different models,” ranging in price from 40 to 140 pounds ($60 to $212), the chain said.