Vinyl Becomes Them: Harry Styles and Olivia Rodrigo Lead Midyear Top 50 LP Sales Chart, Even as Catalog Giants Still Thrive

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticA lot of Harry Styles’ fans are eager to see him slip into something more comfortable… like an LP jacket.

The vinyl version of his third solo album, “Harry’s House,” is a runaway phenomenon in the format, selling 294,000 copies in less than two months of release to easily top the list of 2022 LP bestsellers so far.In fact, the Styles album is about 130,000 copies out in front of the nearest contender for the top spot, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour,” a 2021 release that is hardly receding into the distance in any medium. “Sour” has sold another 165,000 copies on vinyl and is facing little immediate competition for the No.

2 spot.Luminate collected the data on this year’s 50 top vinyl sellers so far for a midyear chart for Variety. (The period surveyed extends just a little past midyear, into mid-July.) The titles that factor in suggest that the vinyl resurgence is not tipping toward any one market or genre, but is strongly impacting multiple demographics.

Once you get past those two pop superstars at the top — and multiple entries by Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish further down — you’ll find that the most acclaimed hip-hop titans are well-represented too, along with plenty of the classic rock catalog titles you’d expect to flourish on vinyl, and even a handful of cult acts whose impact in the format seems to be outsized.Here’s a list of the top 50, with some further numbers-crunching to follow after:As artists with multiple titles in the top 50 go, Swift continues to be the queen of the format, even without a new album out yet in 2023, claiming four spots. “Folklore” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the latter of which is a pricier four-LP set, are nearly tied at Nos.