2023 and 2024 in numbers
It’s been yet another year so once again it’s time to look back at the year gone by as well as try to see what the future holds for us VGM vinyl fans. The last few years have been heavily impacted by COVID-19, but 2023 felt like the first year in a while where we’re back to more stable release windows with fewer delays.
Despite more stability 2023 also marks the first year since I started tracking releases where we had fewer new titles compared to the previous year. Where 2022 had a massive 288 new titles, 2023 saw a mere 250. Which still makes it second place in terms of years with most new releases, so we’re still doing fairly well all things considered. Here’s a little development chart for you if you’re curious:
In terms of planned upcoming releases we’ve got more going on compared to last year, though. Right now I have 184 upcoming titles listed on the site, which is a step up from the 173 from what it was at this time last year. So it looks like we can expect a steady stream of new releases dropping in 2024 as well.
The labels
Back on top for most productive labels this year is iam8bit who shipped (yes, shipped) 24 new releases in 2023. Going into 2023 that’s actually one less than what they had scheduled, but for 2024 they’re a bit more modest with a mere 13 upcoming titles planned.
Laced had another strong year, although slightly less productive than 2023, with 22 new releases and another 11 announced titles coming out.
Ship To Shore PhonoCo. dished out 20 new releases and are currently listed as having 7 announced titles planned – and I know they have some very exciting things yet to be announced.
Curaga smashes into the list of most productive lables with 14 released titles all exclusively in their Video Game LoFi series of arrangement albums. They merely have one known title announced to come up, but I’d be surprised if we don’t see a bit more than just that one eventually.
While Limited Run Games merely had 11 new releases drop after suffering from heavy delays and long preorder wait times, that has not held them back for planning more in the future as they have 21 additional titles prepared for us.
Of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg of upcoming releases as there are many more coming as well. To get an idea of what’s coming you can check out the list of announced upcoming releases right here.
Blip Blop in numbers
This is the eighth year of Blip Blop (wtf?!) and once again there hasn’t been a lot of changes in how things are done and – outside of a few great giveaways – it’s mainly been business as usual.
In 2022 I broke news posts #1000 and this year I’m well past 1200, so the pace of announcing new titles is well good and steady and I’m happy that I’ve been able to announce so many great new titles for yet another year.
The site now lists a massive 2898 VGM vinyl releases well knowing that there’s a large backlog of color variants, represses and similar that have yet to be added. I have some ideas on how to update the site to better handle these, but that will require some development time and skills, which I’m not sure will be feasible in 2024 – but we’ll see.
As always most visitors comes from the United States – that’s about 47% of you, followed by 11% from the UK, 6% from Canada, and 5% and 4% from Germany and France respectively. It’s probably not a big surprise, but most people came for the news about the Cyberpunk 2077 score finally being released on vinyl.
Last year I teased a little project that I was hoping to be able to announce in 2023. Well, things take time, but everything’s still planned and hopefully I’m ready to make an announcement this year instead (and no, I’m not starting a record label – sorry).
You made it this far! Thanks for reading, thanks for 2023 and I hope to see all of you for more VGM vinyl in 2024! Happy new year!