10 years of the Official Vinyl Charts: A timeline

It's been 10 years since the Official Vinyl Albums and Singles Charts were launched.

In that decade, we've seen the rise and rise of vinyl as a format; last year marked the 17th consecutive year of growth of vinyl sales in the UK. 6.7 million vinyl albums were sold in 2024, marking the highest total we've seen in this sector in 30 years.

So, to celebrate, we're taking you on a trip down memory lane.

Step-by-step, here's your guide into the journey vinyl has gone through over the last 10 years - a modern history of the format that staged one almighty comeback.

A timeline - 10 years of the Official Vinyl Charts

April 2015: The launch of the Official Vinyl Albums and Singles Charts

The vinyl resurgence may have been in its infancy a decade ago, but we here at Official Charts saw the tide changing.

On this very week a decade ago, we launched the Official Vinyl Charts - the UK's first dedicated rankings for vinyl, in response to the resurgence in vinyl that was beginning to take hold. In 2014, sales of vinyl LPs had reached a 20 year high (1.29 million) and oh, how that number was to rise...

The first Number 1 on the Official Vinyl Albums Chart belonged to pop-punk group All Time Low, with their sixth album Future Hearts (which also debuted at Number 1 on the main Official Albums Chart). While the first chart-topper on the Official Vinyl Singles Chart was Baby Wants To Ride - a tribute to the late Frankie Knuckles by Underworld vs Heller & Farley.

At the time, All Time Low's Alex Gaskarth told us: "What I love is that there are different worlds of vinyl fans; there’s the audiophiles who swear by the sound of vinyl, the people for who like owning it as a collector’s piece, and then groups like our fans who buy a vinyl of our record simply so they can hang it on their wall."

September 2015: Tesco becomes first UK supermarket to stock vinyl 

In a hint of the changing tides to come, Tesco became the first of the big UK supermarket chains to begin to stock vinyl records in its stores. The first vinyl LP to be stocked on Tesco shelves was Iron Maiden's The Book of Souls, which was available from 55 of the biggest Tesco Extras up and down the country.

March 2016: Sainsbury's follow suit

With vinyl proving irresistible to music shoppers, Sainsbury's jumps on the vinyl bandwagon too, throwing open its shelves in 171 stores up and down the country to collector classics ranging from AC/DC's Back In Black to Nirvana's Nevermind.

October 2017: Liam Gallagher sets new vinyl record with his debut solo album

Liam Gallagher lands straight in at Number 1 with his debut solo album As You Were, selling 103,000 copies in its opening week. It was the biggest one-week vinyl sale in over 20 years, the Gallagher brother cleared a tidy 16,000 vinyl records to kick off a solo career that's boasted several more Number 1s since.

December 2017: Vinyl sales grow for a tenth consecutive year

Record labels' association, the BPI, revealed that sales of vinyl were up 26.8% in 2017, a tenth consecutive year of growth, with 4.1 million purchased in 2017 compared to 205,000 in 2007. Vinyl sales now accounted for almost 1 in 10 of all physical music sales.  Ed Sheeran's ÷ sold 51,700 copies on vinyl to become the best-selling vinyl album of 2017.

 

 

 

 

May 2018: Arctic Monkeys deliver the fastest-selling vinyl of the century so far

May 2018 saw the release of Arctic Monkeys' sixth consecutive Number 1 album Tranquility Base & Hotel. Landing straight into the top spot with a cool 24,500 vinyl sales counting to its total, the album was confirmed as the fastest-selling vinyl album of the century so far. No surprise then that it went on to be the best-selling vinyl album of 2018 too.

February 2019: HMV Oxford Circus closes its doors

The London flagship store of HMV at 363 Oxford Street, one of the biggest entertainment retailers in the country, announced that it would be shuttering in 2019. Ironically, this may have well helped consumers seek out their vinyl album and singles from their local independent record stores.

December 2019: Fleetwood Mac's Rumours crowned best-selling vinyl of the decade

At the close of the decade in which vinyl made its great comeback, Official Charts unveiled the best-selling vinyl albums of the decade, and it was Fleetwood Mac's 1977 classic Rumours that came out top of the pile having sold 130,000 copies on wax since 2010.

May 2020: Launch of The Record Club

A collaboration between Official Charts, Record Store Day, National Album Day and Bowers & Wilkins, The Record Club is a fortnightly live-stream series, a sort of book club for albums, where music acts get the chance to talk to fans about their latest release, with listeners encouraged to purchase the LP from their local independent record shop beforehand and give it a listen.

Hosted by BBC Radio 1's Jess Iszatt, The Record Club began as a response to the closure of physical shops during lockdown. The Record Club is still going strong almost 5 years later; it's most recent episode featured chart-topping working class heroes The Lottery Winners discussing KOKO (which also recently reached Number1 on the Official Vinyl Albums Chart).

January 2021: Number 1s on the Official Vinyl Charts can now get an award! 

If we love anything here at Official Charts, it's the expansion of our brand. In January 2021, we launched the Official Specialist Number 1 Award, as a platform to highlight the diverse range of chart success across our 50+ weekly specialist charts including the Official Vinyl Charts.

Among its first recipients were IDLES (for Ultra Mono, the best-selling album in independent record shops of 2020) and our kid Liam Gallagher (for All You're Dreaming Of being the best-selling vinyl single of 2020).

March 2021: Lana Del Rey's Chemtrails Over The Country Club becomes one of the fastest-selling vinyl albums this century

Ever since Born To Die dropped in 2012, Lana Del Rey has managed to engage one of the most devoted fandoms in all of modern-pop. A high-mark for Lana, then, was the response to 2021's Chemtrails Over The Country Club, her first record since 2019's critically acclaimed, career-shifting Norman F**king Rockwell!

Upon debut, Chemtrails (the first of two albums Lana would release that year) became Lana's fifth UK Number 1 album, and with 16,700 vinyl copies shifted in its opening week, set the record for the fastest-selling vinyl album by a female act this century. 

However, this record was about to be broken and then some...

December 2022: Taylor Swift scores the best-selling vinyl album of 2022 with Midnights

Enter Taylor! Taylor Swift's domination of music is nothing new, but she really began to pull in blockbuster numbers in 2022.

Midnights was announced as the best-selling vinyl album of that year, despite only being released at the end of October. According to Official Charts Company data, Midnights shifted 89,000 vinyl copies in just under two months. Not bad going!

October 2023: National Album Day sparks huge resurgence in vinyl sales

2023's National Album Day certainly put its best foot forward. Thanks to a series of iconic reissues - from S Club 7 to Blur -  Official Charts confirmed that it resulted in a 51% spike in vinyl sales.

Chiming in with this good news, was the return of HMV's flagship Oxford Street store, signalling renewed optimism in the return of physical music to the high street.

February 2024: Kate Bush announced as Record Store Day Ambassador for 2024

Reclusive superstar Kate Bush is notoriously publicity shy (even when she reached Number 1 with Running Up That Hill, she issued a simple statement to her blog), but as an impassioned defender of live and physical music, it was with some surprise that it was announced that Bush would be one of the ambassadors for Record Store Day 2024.

In conjunction with the news, Bush revealed that her little-known track Eat The Music - which was passed up as the lead single of The Red Shoes for the much more commercial Rubberband Girl - would be issued on a special, limited-edition vinyl single for the first time ever.

March 2024: Number of independent record shops reaches a 10 year high in the UK

In March 2024, it was announced that the number of independent record shops in the UK had hit a high in the last decade. Compared to 2013, where there were 339, in 2024 there were 461. A 36% increase!

In tune with this, noted record-store chain Rough Trade announced some exciting new developments; launching their biggest-ever plot in Liverpool, before later announcing they'd be opening their seventh shop on London's iconic Denmark Street.

April 2024: UK vinyl sales enjoy their highest weekly total in 30 years (thank you Taylor Swift!)

Everyone say, thank you Taylor! In conjunction with the release of The Tortured Poets Department and that year's Record Store Day, UK vinyl sales rocketed to a 30 year high; 306,791 vinyl singles and albums were sold in the 17th week of 2024 (split between 269,134 vinyl albums and 37,656 vinyl singles), the highest figures since Official Charts figures began in 1994.

December 2024: Physical music sales rise in the UK for the first time in three decades

The BPI announced that physical music sales in the UK as a whole had returned to growth for the first time in 30 years, all thanks to the vinyl boom.

February 2025: Sam Fender's People Watching becomes fastest-selling vinyl by a British act this century

One of the most exciting new British acts to break through in the last decade, expectations were high for Sam Fender's third album People Watching...and its debut more than delivered, and a new generation welcomed the arrival of a true superstar.

In its opening week, People Watching became the fastest-selling vinyl by a British act this century (!), with 43,000 vinyl sold. Only Taylor Swift (of course) has sold more this century. 

April 2025: Official Charts celebrates a decade of the Official Vinyl Charts - Taylor Swift claims both best-selling new release and fastest-selling vinyl album in the last 10 years

As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Official Vinyl Charts, we crunched some numbers and revealed several new stats. Taylor Swift came out on top; claiming both the best-selling new release vinyl album of the last decade (Midnights) and the fastest-selling vinyl album of the decade too (The Tortured Poets Department).

Here's to the next 10 years!

The Official Vinyl Albums Chart and Vinyl Singles Chart are published Fridays 5.45pm. Sign up to the Official Charts mailing list and opt in to 'vinyl' to receive special alerts about Record Store Day exclusives and more. Get the latest vinyl news from Official Charts here.

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