First-ever Aotearoa vinyl-only charts published

Recorded Music NZ marks a milestone in vinyl’s revival with the release of a one-off set of Official Aotearoa Music Vinyl Charts, launched alongside The Long Play, a new podcast exploring "the warped history of vinyl in Aotearoa" from Charlotte Ryan and The Spinoff.

The charts capture the top vinyl albums and artists across New Zealand between 2003 and 2025, reflecting the format’s return to significance over that time. The Long Play is a four-part series tracing vinyl’s journey from its 19th Century origins to its digital era resurgence, featuring voices from across the music industry, including artists, historians, retailers and label heads.

Recorded Music’s Director of Data & Analysis Paul Kennedy features in the podcast, and below offers some more context for the vinyl charts, and recent trends.

Jump straight to the Top 40 Vinyl Charts
Jump straight to the Top 20 Aotearoa Vinyl Charts

There was always a satisfying certainty in seeing that thin, perfectly gift-wrapped square under the Christmas tree.

Growing up in the 70s and into the early-80s, unaware my job would one day revolve around tallying up music sales, it was just great news to me that the parents or grandparents had splashed out on a vinyl record, not socks – the question was just whether they had got the latest version of Solid Gold Hits or last month's!

A few years on, by the time I was buying music for myself, it was all over. CDs and cassettes had arrived in force. And come the day I was fully responsible for compiling Recorded Music NZ's weekly Official Charts in the early-2000s, the chart returns I would see rolling in from retailers nationwide were virtually vinyl-free. Yes, vinyl was still floating around. But it was confined to the secondhand bins at Real Groovy and elsewhere. We thought that was where it was destined to stay.

However, as Charlotte Ryan and The Spinoff crew have canvassed so well in The Long Play podcast, the longer story of New Zealanders' love affair with vinyl has had many ups and downs across the decades. And vinyl would be back. Big time.

The Spinoff’s series has been the impetus for Recorded Music NZ to do some proper detective work. Just what have been the biggest vinyl sellers in recent years? What are the true metrics around volume growth?

The rumours, and the near constant novelty news stories about 'the vinyl revival', may have been anecdotally correct but the claims of gigantic percentage increases always suffered from one thing – a low base (ostensibly zero) meant most of the flash sounding stories about a 'surge' in the percentage of sales were hot air. Until they weren't…

The wider story of music formats through the 2000s was vastly more concerned with downloads, piracy, streaming audio, video and so much more. We, of course, tracked total physical sales through this era – mainly to see how dramatically it was falling away in the face of illegal file sharing and then iTunes downloads and then streaming.

Thanks to some hard work, in particular by my Recorded Music NZ teammate Data Specialist Michael Cathro, we've been back through 20 years of music sales submissions. In some cases, it remains unclear when a music retailer reported a sale whether they meant a CD or a piece of vinyl. They didn’t specify.

However, for a majority of submissions, the barcodes or even just the word 'LP' in brackets allowed Michael to direct the retrospective sheep down either side of the musical drafting chutes. As any modern data wrangler will tell you... it pays to keep the raw files.

We examined just over 30 million physical sales in Aotearoa. Here's what we found:

• Of those sales, just over 29 million were CDs
• Slightly over one million sales were of vinyl
• Of that million, more than half of all vinyl sales occurred in just the last four-and-a-half years
• At its nadir, in 2008, fewer than 200 new vinyl records were sold (just 0.01% of total sales)
• By 2024, vinyl made up 48.97% of physical sales

In the first half of 2025, vinyl is now tracking very slightly ahead of CD sales – something I can only guess was probably last seen in the very early-80s.

Although glimmers of a revival are discernible in our retrospective data from around 2010 or so, it was still margin of error stuff. For context, the stories you would read at that time about the 'explosion' in vinyl sales as a percentage of the market actually meant going from 200 sales to 800 or so. While CDs were still selling well over three million copies.

It's really only from 2017 that the case for a true revival taking hold among consumers can be made. That year vinyl sales reached 37,000 units while CD sales were simultaneously in serious decline – thanks mainly to competition from a new phenomenon called streaming. Vinyl made up 11% of physical sales that year.

The twin trends – vinyl units increasing, CD units falling – have played out ever since.

In 2024, more than 200,000 vinyl records were sold. Only slightly more CDs were sold that year. What's more, the higher prices of vinyl mean that by value, vinyl sales made up nearly 80% of wholesale revenues from physical that year.

Among the artists, the biggest success stories of the vinyl revival are an intriguing mix. We have compiled a definitive list of top vinyl titles and artists, which can be found at the links below:

Top 40 Vinyl Charts

Top 20 Aotearoa Vinyl Charts

Some might have assumed the classic acts of the 70s and 80s, whose fans might have stuck with vinyl all along, would dominate. A few have. Pink Floyd, Queen, Split Enz, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, The Beatles et al do all feature prominently.

But we don’t collect second hand sales data, and as mentioned above, more than half of the million sales of vinyl in the last 20 years happened in just the last four-and-a-half years. And you know who was not only pretty big in this era, but also made vinyl variants a big part of the fandom experience? Taylor Swift.

The full list is also heavily influenced by which artists, and their labels, have invested recently in reissues. These are incredibly popular. Most of the big sellers, especially of New Zealand music, are albums which were popular sellers on CD back in the day but have only been pressed on vinyl for the first time in the last few years.

Rather than spoil the fun here, I urge you to just go and absorb the Official Charts lists. Part nostalgia, part discovery, but all fascinating!

Finally, it does look to me as though 2025 may be a milestone in this decade-long revival story. Yes, vinyl is still growing – and for the first time in at least 40 years, it is likely to out-sell CDs by volume this year.

Not only that, after years of freefall, CDs are actually returning in popularity too. As Charlotte finds in The Long Play, it’s clear a new generation has embraced vinyl in recent years. Now a second wave seems to be rediscovering CDs too. It may be a mix of Gen X nostalgia, a little bit of Gen Z-driven dissatisfaction with streaming, or perhaps a little bit of taking the next best physical option as vinyl prices rise.

Whether this proves to be a sustainable uptick or just a blip remains to be seen. Either way, it's interesting times for artists, music lovers and data nerds alike. Now.... about cassettes.

Find out more about vinyl in Aotearoa via The Long Play, produced by The Spinoff in association with Recorded Music NZ, The Official Aotearoa Music Charts, Holiday Records and Coffee Supreme, and hosted by Charlotte Ryan.