Australia posts a seventh straight year of growth, with vinyl up again

Seven years and counting: Australian recorded music keeps climbing

There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from watching something written off as dead refuse, stubbornly and with increasing confidence, to lie down. ARIA's 2025 figures — released in early 2026 — confirm that Australian recorded music has now posted seven consecutive years of wholesale revenue growth, with total wholesale revenue rising 1.4% to A$727 million. That is not a blip or a post-pandemic rebound artefact anymore. That is a structural shift, and the vinyl component of it deserves to be understood clearly rather than simply cheered from the sidelines.

Let me put the numbers on the table first, because they are genuinely striking. Australian vinyl revenue grew 4.1% to A$46.3 million, on the back of more than 1.2 million units shipped across the country. More telling still: vinyl now accounts for 68.2% of all physical revenue. Physical music overall — the standout performer of the entire year by any fair reading — surged 11.0% to A$67.9 million. In a market where streaming dominates conversation and column inches, physical formats grew at a rate that dwarfs the overall industry figure. That asymmetry is worth sitting with.

Why physical outpaced the market so dramatically

The 1.4% overall growth figure is respectable for a mature market. Eleven percent physical growth in the same year is extraordinary. What explains the gap? A few things, and they are worth separating.

First, there is the straightforward collector and enthusiast demand that has been building since roughly 2017 in Australia. The people buying vinyl today are not, on the whole, casual nostalgists who picked up a turntable at a weekend market and forgot about it by the following summer. The sustained nature of this growth — seven years, not one or two — points to a genuine, deeply embedded listening culture. Record Store Day continues to matter here. Independent record shops in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and beyond have professionalised. The quality of new vinyl pressings, particularly from specialist labels and audiophile-oriented reissue houses, has improved markedly.

Second, and this is something I think deserves more direct acknowledgment in industry commentary, the equipment side has kept pace. You cannot sustain 1.2 million units shipped annually without a corresponding base of people who have turntables — and increasingly, good turntables — connected to serious systems. Entry-level all-in-one units remain popular as a gateway, but the conversation among committed listeners has moved decisively toward separates, proper phono stages, and speakers that can actually reveal what a well-pressed record is capable of.

Third, there is the gifting economy. Vinyl has, for better or worse, become a culturally legible gift in a way that a streaming subscription never quite manages. You can hold a record, read its liner notes, study its artwork, put it on a shelf. In a digital world, that tactile presence has a value that transcends audiophile purity arguments. Many of those 1.2 million units will have been Christmas or birthday purchases. Some percentage of those recipients will go deeper. That is how the community sustains itself.

What 68.2% of physical revenue actually means

When vinyl represents more than two-thirds of all physical music revenue, the CD and other physical format conversation becomes structurally marginal — at least in revenue terms. That does not mean CDs are gone; there remains a devoted audience, particularly among classical and jazz listeners who value the convenience and the archival stability of the format. But the direction of travel is clear, and it has been clear for some years.

What interests me more is the implication for how retailers, distributors and manufacturers calibrate their Australian strategies. If you are an overseas manufacturer of turntables, phono stages, integrated amplifiers or loudspeakers, and you are not taking the Australian market seriously, you are leaving money on a table that has been growing every year for seven years. The argument for local distribution investment, for Australian pricing that reflects real purchasing power rather than lazy currency conversion, has never been stronger.

For consumers, the practical implication is that the ecosystem supporting vinyl playback in Australia — the shops, the pressing plants with distribution arrangements here, the specialist retailers carrying cartridges and styluses and record-cleaning equipment — is in better health than it has been at any point in the modern revival. That is genuinely good news if you are considering building or upgrading a vinyl playback system.

The system question: where to put your money in 2026

Growth figures are interesting. What most readers of this site want to know is: given this context, where does a serious listener in Australia focus their investment? Let me give you my honest thinking.

The turntable and phono stage

This is where everything begins and, frankly, where far too many otherwise intelligent system builders under-invest. A record that costs you A$35 or A$50 — and new vinyl at that price point is no longer remarkable — deserves a playback chain worthy of it. The turntable market in 2026 is well served at multiple price points. Something like the Rega Planar 3 (check price) remains a benchmark in the mid-tier: a design philosophy that prioritises rigidity, simplicity and real engineering over feature count. It is the kind of table that rewards careful cartridge matching and, crucially, does not get in the way of the music.

The phono stage question is one I keep returning to in conversations with readers who have upgraded their turntables but kept a compromised phono input. A dedicated external phono stage — even a modest one — will, in almost every case, outperform the phono circuitry built into an integrated amplifier at the same price point. The engineering trade-offs involved in building a genuinely low-noise, properly loaded phono stage into a chassis already handling power amplification are substantial. Manufacturers who get it right tend to charge accordingly.

Amplification

The integrated amplifier market in Australia is currently very well supplied, which is a good problem to have as a buyer. There are excellent options across a wide range of budgets and philosophies. Valve amplification, which is what my section of this site is named for, continues to attract listeners who find that the harmonic character of a well-designed tube stage suits the tonal qualities of vinyl playback particularly well. That is not mysticism; it is a coherent aesthetic preference, and the market supports it.

That said, I am not a purist about topology. The McIntosh MA352 (check price) — a hybrid design combining tube input stages with solid-state output — represents one compelling answer to the question of how to get the textural qualities of valves without sacrificing the grip and authority that transistors bring to bass control. The Marantz Model 40n (check price) takes a different approach: a fully solid-state integrated with a genuine pedigree in analogue circuit design and a built-in phono stage that is more than merely adequate.

Loudspeakers

This is where system building for vinyl gets genuinely interesting, because the qualities that make a speaker rewarding for analogue playback — a natural midrange presentation, a coherent soundstage, sensitivity to fine dynamic gradations — are also the qualities that make a speaker revealing of everything else in the chain. You cannot hide behind digital correction when the source is an analogue groove.

Standmount speakers remain my default recommendation for most Australian listening rooms, which tend toward the smaller end of what you'd find in comparable markets overseas. The best standmount speakers for serious listening offer a combination of imaging precision and placement flexibility that floorstanders simply cannot match in a constrained space. The KEF LS50 Meta (check price) is the obvious reference point in this conversation — a speaker that has been refined over multiple generations into something genuinely special — but the Bowers & Wilkins 705 S3 (check price) and KEF R3 Meta (check price) offer more bass extension and dynamic headroom for listeners who want to push the system harder.

The broader context: streaming isn't going away, and that is fine

I want to be careful not to frame this as a zero-sum contest between vinyl and streaming, because that framing does not reflect how most serious listeners actually live. The majority of committed vinyl enthusiasts I know also use streaming services — for discovery, for convenience, for formats that simply do not exist on wax. A well-chosen streaming amplifier can coexist with a turntable in the same system quite harmoniously. The best streaming amplifiers and all-in-one systems have become sophisticated enough that they no longer represent a meaningful compromise in sound quality for casual listening; they are a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the analogue chain.

What the ARIA figures tell us is that Australian listeners are not choosing between analogue and digital. They are choosing both, and they are spending more on both over time. Total industry revenue growth of 1.4% with physical surging 11% means that physical is growing faster than the market overall while streaming revenue presumably holds relatively flat or grows modestly. These are not competing forces; they are different modes of engagement with music, serving different emotional and practical needs.

What the seven-year run tells us about Australian listening culture

Seven consecutive years of growth is a remarkable statistic in any industry, and it deserves to be understood as a cultural statement as much as an economic one. Australian audiences have demonstrated, consistently and with their wallets, that they value recorded music and that they are willing to pay for formats that give them a meaningful, physical relationship with that music.

This has implications beyond record shops and turntable manufacturers. It suggests that the broader ecosystem of serious audio — the loudspeaker manufacturers, the amplifier designers, the acoustic treatment specialists, the high-quality cable makers — has a genuinely healthy domestic market to work with. The listener who starts with vinyl often goes deeper: better cartridges, better phono stages, better amplification, better speakers, better room treatment. The rabbit hole is familiar to everyone reading this, and the ARIA figures suggest that more Australians than ever are standing at the edge of it, ready to jump.

For those at the beginning of that journey, the practical advice is simple: buy good records, buy a turntable designed by engineers rather than marketing departments, invest in a real phono stage, and find speakers that reveal rather than obscure. The infrastructure to support you — the shops, the pressing plants, the online communities, the specialist retailers — is in better shape than it has been in a generation. Seven straight years of growth is not a coincidence. It is an invitation.

Looking ahead

Whether 2026 delivers an eighth year of growth will depend on factors well beyond the enthusiasm of the listening community: economic conditions, discretionary spending pressures, the continued health of independent retail, and the willingness of labels to keep investing in quality vinyl pressings rather than treating the format as a revenue-extraction exercise on cheap, poorly-mastered reissues. That last point matters more than the industry tends to acknowledge publicly. The listeners driving these numbers are not uninformed; they know when they have been sold a flat, dynamically compressed pressing on thin, poorly centred vinyl, and they remember.

For now, though, the direction of travel is clear and the trajectory is upward. Australia's recorded music industry has earned its seventh consecutive growth year, and the vinyl component of it has earned particular attention. These are not passive consumers being sold something they don't want. These are engaged, discerning listeners investing in something they care about. The industry, and the equipment manufacturers who serve it, would do well to keep meeting them at that level.