Exclusive bonus tracks… Five different shades of vinyl… Tour booklet with exclusive photos… “Fans First” exclusive picture disc… Boxed set with candle, hoodie and CD… Target exclusive, Amazon exclusive, Urban Outfitters exclusive… exclusive exclusive exclusive…
“Variants” — multiple different vinyl, CD or cassette versions of an already-released album or EP — have become a booming business in the music industry, helping to drive sales and chart numbers for artists ranging from superstars to cult favorites. According to Luminate Data’s 2024 mid-year report released Tuesday morning, the top 10 U.S. physical albums of 2024 carried an average of seven different vinyl variants, two cassettes and 13 CDs (the latter mostly for K-pop acts).
Unquestionably in Taylor Swift’s case, they’ve helped her latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department” to hold the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 for 12 weeks, three months past its April 19 release date (a rarity in these short-attention-span times). Each time a contender for the No. 1 spot rises up, she drops new, limited-edition variants that give the album’s sales another boost.
Rodrigo is no slouch either, with at least a dozen variants in the vinyl format alone of her “Guts” album, which is currently at No. 26 on the Billboard 200 some 44 weeks after its release last September. Her label and team played the game masterfully, releasing multiple variants of the album on differently colored vinyl with one different unlisted bonus track each, plus a picture disc, all for $30 a pop — and a special “vinyl & candles hoodie boxset” for $75, along with CDs, cassettes, and items like a “1 year anniversary journal / zine / CD” of her debut album “Sour.” After a quick sellout of most of the different LP variants at her webstore, she released a deluxe edition of the latest album, “Guts (Spilled),” that collected the four unlisted bonus songs from those prior editions and added a fifth all-new song, on two-LP splatter vinyl.
These variants not only carry a profit margin exponentially larger than streaming, each physical item counts as a full album sale (by contrast, it takes 1,500 individual song streams to equal one album sale, per the RIAA).
Even Billie Eilish, who had strong words about the environmental waste involved in manufacturing and shipping variants (before clarifying that she wasn’t singling out Swift or any other single artist), has played the game in as green a fashion as she could manage, with the following caveat. “For some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging…which ups the sales and gets them more money,” Eilish wrote in her Instagram story last March. “I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is… it’s some of the biggest artists in the world making f–king 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more.” She’s not wrong: Physical product, particularly vinyl, is enormously wasteful and expensive to produce.
To her credit, Eilish — who is passionate about environmental issues — walked it like she talked it, releasing eight different variants, but from recycled or other green-leaning vinyl formats, along with a recyclable compound for the vinyl colors and recycled paper and boards for the packaging and shipping boxes (head here for details).
While record companies have always strived to sell as many units as possible — after all, it’s their job — this particular trend arguably originated earlier this century in Japan and Korea, where CD sales are still strong and the passion surrounding K-pop and J-pop acts inspires an omnivorous acquisitiveness in fans. While the CD’s small size can limit the options, record labels went to town, stuffing the collections with photos, booklets, stickers, bookmarks, trading cards, bonus discs and of course multiple versions of the same album featuring a different group member on the cover; with 12” boxed sets, all bets were off.
The trend took off in the U.S. during the pandemic, when we all eagerly awaited the next exciting thing to arrive on our doorsteps — indeed, Luminate data shows that the number of physical variants related to Top 10 Billboard 200 albums started increasing in the second quarter of 2020. And the K-pop and J-pop CD trend continues in the U.S., as CD sales were unexpectedly robust in one genre: The U.S. top 10 physical K-Pop albums had an average of 14.6 CD variants and 3.7 LPs through the first half of 2024, according to Luminate, with top acts Tomorrow x Together, A-Teez and Twice appearing on the tally.
But is this variant gold-rush benefitting the larger music ecosystem as well as the artists, their labels and publishers? Yes and no. While Michael Kurtz, cofounder of Record Store Day, notes that variants are often great for record stores and other retailers when the artist is actually cognizant of them, the proliferation of artists selling variants direct-to-consumers from their websites often cuts them out completely.
“The best artists don’t allow that to happen,” Kurtz says, mentioning independent acts “who have a real connection to record stores and create specifics items for them.” While he demurred from singling out a number of artists who fit that category, he did praise Pearl Jam for its record store-friendly practices, including issuing variants sent to stores in different regions of the country, along with selling d2c.
“I think they did eight different variants of their latest album [“Dark Matter”], so the person in California was getting a different color than the person in New York or Atlanta,” he says. “That’s a really creative way of rewarding longtime local fans.” He also pointed to Swift’s past history of sending a number of signed variants to record stores and directing her fans to them.
So who is actually buying all these variants? As one would expect, superfans, which all labels say will be the object of laser-focused attention for growth in the coming years. Emiley, a 31-year-old longtime Swiftie, recently explained the appeal of the artist’s variants to Variety. “Each one typically has its own artwork and fresh photos that make it unique,” she said. “I know her team puts a lot of work into that. And I just think it’s really special to be able to have the entire collection and appreciate it as a whole instead of just having one individual [album].”
As any vinyl junkie can attest, that kind of superfandom can lead to borderline obsession. Belle, 48, initially bought just the initial “Tortured Poets” collector’s edition CD, the first vinyl piece to include a bonus track, and the cassette. “And then [Swift] dropped the next one. And I did the same thing. And then she dropped the third one. And then I was like, ‘Well, I think I’m just gonna order the vinyl and the collector CD and not the cassette.’ And I was like, ‘Why am I trying to save 20 bucks?’ Like, that’s just ridiculous, you know? And then the fourth one, obviously, you have to have all of them. And then she dropped the case to put them in.
“And then,” she continued, “I didn’t order the single when it first released, but then she dropped the ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ acoustic, and my daughter was like, ‘You have to order that one. That’s your favorite song.’ And then I was like, ‘Well, I might as well order the acoustic,’” she says. “I’ve never done this with another thing where I felt like I needed to have all the versions.”
If that seems a bit excessive, or even exploitative, some superfans agree. Stacey, 27, said that some of the criticism is “valid” and that she eventually had to cancel some of her “Tortured Poet” purchases. “When they started releasing digital variants where you had to buy the album three more times just to get three separate voice memos, it was a little bit much, as they were charging $5.99 per digital album. I had to draw a line somewhere.” she says. “I didn’t think it was necessary for me to own 17 versions of the same album, as I’m already at 13.”
Despite the financial windfall from the variant boom, the news isn’t all good: Physical product sales, which enjoyed years of double-digit growth, have slowed to 3.8% growth in the first half of 2024 versus the same period in 2023, according to Luminate (which did not include independent stores in its figures but says it will again in the future), and a report from the Vinyl Alliance obtained by Variety suggests that the market may have hit saturation. While the report notes that the global trade organization IFPI has reported 18 straight years of revenue growth for the U.S. vinyl format — with more than 120.9% growth between 2020 and 2023 — there is a huge backlog of unsold inventory, presumably mostly from non-superstars, that is sitting in warehouses and in some cases being sold below cost by labels.
Consequently, the vinyl pressing plants — which opened or re-opened en masse during the pandemic to meet booming demand — are seeing their production down dramatically.
“Records to be pressed in 2024 [are] at least 30-40% down compared to last year (some pressing plants suffer more depending on their client base),” a bullet-pointed segment of the report reads. “This is mainly caused by the fact that warehouses are still quite full because of over-ordering due to the long lead-times during COVID. Sales to consumers don’t show this drastic decrease, however [they show] no growth either.”
While this trend is probably not hurting the Swifts and Rodrigos of the world, their rising tides do not necessarily lift all boats.
Still, against all odds, a whole new generation — often with little connection to the past — has discovered how much fun collecting vinyl, CDs and other music ephemera can be, and that same Vinyl Alliance report notes that along with the U.S. multiple major European countries saw huge vinyl revenue growth between 2020 and 2023 — the U.K. 58.6%, France 74.7%, Germany 61.4%, the Netherlands a whopping 115.9%. All markets combined for 91% revenue growth between 2020 and 2023, totaling US $1.734 billion in wholesale dollars.
It is no accident that the vinyl revival began with the first Record Store Day in 2008.
“These kinds of variants all came out of Record Store Day,” Kurz says. “We started off having all kinds of different vinyl colors, but we actually got out of that business because it just seemed like too much to have people buying the same album in a different color rather than giving them something different,” like unreleased songs or archival recordings.
While he notes several labels that, by their actions, seem to respect the fans and the marketplace, “The big record companies are doing what they always have,” he says with a laugh. “Taking a good idea and overdoing it.”
Additional reporting by Julia MacCary and Chris Willman.
