2016 and 2017 in Numbers
I’ve been plotting this post for a while, because 2016 has been an insane year for VGM vinyl fans and collectors. And what better way than starting a new year by taking a look back at the old one?
Before getting started I can reveal that 2016 has been (by far) the year with most VGM vinyl releases ever. A rough count says that we’ve had around 90 new titles (including both retail and promo only releases). For reference, previous record years 2015 and 1987 had just over 50 and just under 40 respectively.
It’s been speculated that the VGM vinyl market would be over-saturated if things are to continue this way. However, there’s 60 new titles announced for 2017 so things don’t appear to be slowing down just yet. It seems that the new year will be even more crazy and filled with releases than 2016.
The Labels
So who’s putting out all of these? Well, anyone who’s been following the scene will know that the big player right now is iam8bit. With 34 releases out (and another 12 announced for 2017) they are now the most productive VGM vinyl label of all time. A record previously held by Japanese G.M.O. Records who put out 29 records during the late 80s.
However, they are not at all the only label doing VGM vinyl out there;
Black Screen Records had a great year with 4 indie game soundtrack releases and 2 announcements for the new year so far.
Data Discs continued with great SEGA releases and added 5 new ones – including the highly anticipated Streets Of Rage 2 soundtrack – to their discography. And there’s already 2 announced releases coming out in 2017.
Ship To Shore PhonoCo. also put out 4 new titles – 2 of which are the first in a series of releases featuring music from Taito and Konami games. And they have 8 new titles planned for the new year – starting with the anticipated Snatcher soundtrack.
Mondo only had one new release – the Castlevania soundtrack. They did however announce a big Konami partnership, so while no dates have been confirmed, 2017 looks to be an exciting year from them.
Spacelab9 added 3 new titles to their discography and I have it on good authority that we’ll be seeing more VGM releases in the new year. There are no concrete announcements, but there have been some hints about what’s to come.
Then we have Ghost Ramp who put out their first 3 VGM vinyl releases in 2016 and have 4 upcoming titles announced.
Another 2016 debutant is Laced Records who stormed onto the VGM vinyl world with their succesful Hotline Miami Kickstarter. They also had a good year with 6 releases. No announcements for 2017 so far, but I think we’ll hear news soon enough.
Want to read more about VGM vinyl labels? I have a small page listing them all with links for their sites right here.
These are of course not the only labels, but they are the most active ones. Not to mention that several releases have been self-released by composers and developers as well.
Blip Blop in 2016 (also in numbers)
Well, it’s been an active year in VGM vinyl, which means it’s been an active year for me. Blip Blop celebrated its first anniversary back in July (meaning we’ve been rocking this thing for almost 1½ year now!).
I ran my first ever contest with Spacelab9 where two lucky participants won copies of the Fallout 4 picture disc, which was great fun.
I also wrote my 100th post for Blip Blop recently, and announced that I had added the 700th release to the directory. Well, right now we’re sitting at 788 releases so we’ll see an announcement for 800 available releases soon enough.
The site is covering releases with music from 918 games from 66 different gaming platforms.
How about visitors? Well, since launching the site on the new domain back in February there’s been 13,308 different visitors to the site. More than half of all visitors are from the United States (with the United Kingdom and Germany having the second and third most visitors with just under 10% each). Each month half of all visitors are people who have previously visited this site – so you guys keep coming back! Most of you are coming from Google, but after that most of you seem to be visiting from social media sites (Twitter, Reddit and Facebook in particular).
So what’s planned for 2017? I have some ideas to implement a few requested features and pages, but I’m not a great programmer so it might take a little while. There are some secret projects planned, that I can’t talk about yet – but they will be cool! Other than that Blip Blop will keep on rolling like it’s done for the past year and a half. And as usual, please send me any good ideas and suggestions for the site and I’ll see what I can do.
So this was 2016! The first full year of Blip Blop. I hope you’ve had as much fun with VGM vinyl as I’ve had so far and that 2017 turns out to be just as fantastic.