Urban Outfitters Say They’re the World’s Biggest Vinyl Retailer
Photo via Urban Outfitters
Clothing and lifestyle outlet Urban Outfitters has taken advantage of the vinyl resurgence of the past decade big time. Calvin Hollinger, the company’s Chief Administrative Officer, claimed yesterday that Urban Outfitters is the world’s largest vinyl seller, as Buzzfeed reports.
“Music is very, very important to the Urban customer… in fact, we are the world’s number one vinyl seller,” he said in a meeting with the outlet’s analysts.
Vinyl sales have steadily risen over the last decade. 6.1 million records were sold last year—the highest since at least 1991, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which only began tracking sales data that year. (Of course, that’s a fraction of sales during the vinyl industry’s heyday.)
When Urban Outfitters recently opened their new store at Herald Square in New York City, they partnered with California indie powerhouse Amoeba Music to open a music shop inside the store.
Read “Wax and Wane”, Joel Oliphint’s look at the vinyl comeback. In that story, John Beeler of Asthmatic Kitty is quoted as saying, “Vinyl was a physical format that defied the baskets of CDs that you’d see at the mall or in record stores, but now you go into Urban Outfitters and there’s a whole wall of vinyl… it’s become co-opted. It’s something that belonged to the independent music industry for a long time, but it no longer does. It feels like cassettes are now what vinyl was 10 years ago.”
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