Top 20 Aotearoa Albums Vinyl Chart Updated for NZ Music Month 2026

In October 2025 Recorded Music marked a milestone in vinyl's revival, partnering with the Spinoff for its now award-winning podcast The Long Play. Presented by Charlotte Ryan, the series explores the warped history of vinyl in Aotearoa. 

As part of this project, the Recorded Music Charts & Data team examined a range of historical retail sales data to deliver some stats and publish a special first-ever series of charts representing the top-selling vinyl albums and artists since 2003. This imperfect process required poring over two decades of raw data about physical sales to retrospectively separate out vinyl from other physical formats.

This Te Marama Puoro O Aotearoa | NZ Music Month we have revisited this work to continue to tell the story of Aotearoa albums on vinyl. To do this our team has:

Included the most recent sales data – up to May 2026

• Reviewed more retail sources – 27 in total, including some retail stores no longer in existence (like the Sounds and CD Store chains)
• Used additional tools to identify past vinyl releases, including via barcode recognition

The result sees a few changes in the Top 20 Aotearoa Albums:

• Fat Freddy’s Drop climbs to #1 with Based On A True Story. BOATS roars to #1 after our deeper dive into historical data.
• #1 sellers from 2025, including Lorde’s Virgin and Marlon Williams' Te Whare Tīwekaweka enter the Chart showing the continued resurgence of the vinyl format in Aotearoa.

View the refreshed Top 20 Aotearoa Vinyl Chart here