Did vinyl sales just hit the proverbial brick wall?

So...vinyl and cassette sales both grew but the market for physical media overall is shrinking.The vinyl revival has always been niche in the context of overall music consumption. If the figures quoted are accurate, it hasn't hit a brick wall. Just the growth of uptake has slowed.

That's hardly a surprise. It's a very expensive way to reproduce what are now mainly digital files originally. And now that those files are available streamed in their original format - which is increasingly high resolution digital - the usp of vintyl decreases.

As a final negative, vinyl is environmentally unfriendly and the recent state of oil prices will have done nothing to improve pricing of vinyl releases.

Despite all that, sales are still growing.

@mojistyn - the revival of yinyl sales was not driven by an older demographic.  While a proportion of older listeners have undoubtedly come back to vinyl, having previously switched over to CD, a cursory glance at the racks of any store selling new records will reflect the fact that there is a huge proportion of music which is not targeted at an older demographic.

Contrary to what you say about phones and computers, it's precisely because so much of the modern world is virtual that younger people are attracted to a physical format, especially one that is both visually and aurally rich.

There's a simpler explanation for slowing vinyl sales - inflation and the crunch in tech jobs. Vinyl records are a luxury purchase and an easy casualty when people's real spending power is decreased.