In a new collaborative effort to help the music industry get a handle on managing vinyl inventory, the Vinyl Alliance and Luminate are partnering on an initiative through which they will collect data on how many vinyl records are being pressed at vinyl plants around the globe.

The move was announced at the Record Store Day Summer Camp held last week in New Orleans, where more than 450 record store owners, label and distribution executives, and other companies involved in physical music convened to discuss the state of the business.

As such, the Vinyl Alliance and Luminate both had prominent placement in the conference’s programming. While Luminate and its antecedent companies have been around since 1990, the Vinyl Alliance came together in 2020 thanks to the resurgence of the vinyl format. It consists of key members of the physical music sector, including record labels, retail and distribution merchandisers, replay hardware companies and vinyl component suppliers. The alliance also includes more than 25 pressing plants, from which the initiative hopes to collect manufacturing data (several big players in the sector have already agreed to report to it, including GZ, described in the announcement as the world’s largest producer of vinyl records.).

“This will provide a 360 picture on vinyl,” Luminate director of partnerships Chris Muratore said when telling conference attendees about the initiative. Vinyl Alliance general manager Ryan Mitrovich added, “The production data has never before been linked to the retail sales data.”

Earlier in the day on Wednesday (July 30), the first general session of the conference kicked off with a Luminate presentation on the state of the U.S. industry regarding physical music. That presentation showed that physical sales were down 3.2% at mid-year 2025 with 34.2 million copies of vinyl and CD scanned so far this year versus 35.3 million last year. But Muratore pointed out that’s only because this year’s numbers are going up against the juggernaut that was Taylor Swift‘s The Tortured Poets Department last year. According to Luminate, by midyear in 2024, that album had rung up just shy of 2.08 million copies in physical formats.

In a detailed analysis of the state of physical, Muratore relayed that vinyl accounted for 60% of all physical sales by midyear 2025, while CDs stood at 40%. While he didn’t break it out by piece counts, that works out to 20.33 million vinyl copies and 13.63 million CD copies. Further, he reflected that those percentages had shifted since 2021, when vinyl had a 51% share of physical albums while CDs stood at 49%.

Looking at physical sales by type of retail store, independent stores are by far the largest segment of physical sales, having scanned 11.9 million copies by midyear, or 34.7%. That was followed by e-commerce, which has a 28.5% share; mass market — which besides Target and Walmart now includes chains like Barnes & Noble — at 24.1%; non-traditional retail at 1.4%; venue sales at 1.1%; and the growing direct-to-consumer channel at 10.1%, as reported by Muratore.

Unlike in the overall U.S. market, where R&B/hip-hop is the dominant genre, especially in streaming, rock music is dominant in terms of physical sales, where it has about 45% market share. While Muratore didn’t provide physical piece counts for genres, his chart showed rock with slightly over 15 million copies scanned so far this year (up 6% from last year), while noting that R&B/hip-hop, at slightly over 5 million units, was up 26% on a unit basis over the genre’s performance at midyear in 2024. Finally, he added that physical sales in pop had fallen 28%, though he once again attributed that to Swift’s performance last year.

In other news, Muratore noted after Luminate’s misstep in un-weighting indie retail at the beginning of 2024 — which ultimately resulted in a new and improved way of collecting indie data after Luminate partnered with StreetPulse — over 400 stores are now reporting sales to the StreetPulse/Luminate system. “That’s the largest amount of stores ever reporting sales going all the way back to 1991,” Muratore said. “We want to break the 500-store mark by the end of the year.”

In contrast, under the old, flawed weighting system, Luminate only had about 70 indie accounts with 140 stores reporting, he said.

Turning his attention to Record Store Day, Muratore noted this year, the U.S. industry had 1 million album sales that week, marking only the 12th time in the last 10 years that the U.S. industry has achieved 1 million sales in a weeklong period. In fact, Record Store Day in total has accounted for five of the 12 weeks that topped 1 million vinyl sales. This year, he reported, there were 337 exclusives, while over 100 titles sold out.

Muratore also pointed out that while physical is slightly down this year, when the new weighting formula is backdated to the unweighted sales in the first half of 2024, the indie sector is actually up 12% in vinyl, while indie CD sales are up 25%. He noted that one of the factors in the CD sales increase is likely pricing, considering elevated pricing on vinyl records has pushed more consumers to buy cheaper CDs.

Finally, Muratore urged store owners in the audience who are not yet reporting their sales to see StreetPulse CEO John Weston and sign up. “It’s a benefit to everybody if you report,” Muratore said. “Your numbers matter and need to be counted.”