What is the actual percentage of people exclusively listening to vinyl vs digital?

Who knows....Funny when I used to buy lps.i alway bought stuff on sale $3 to $5 .Then the Cds.found a guy who sold then $9.99 ....So how I'm not paying $39 to $49 for a album....Please.

By the time I was old enough as a kid to buy music, cassettes and boom boxes were the thing and cd’s were just a couple years away. So I never got into vinyl.

Now, back into audio last few years, vinyl just seems like too deep a rabbit hole right now with digital so good and so much further for me to explore on that trail now. But maybe some day when I get older and have more time.

Interestingly, my younger brother (low 40’s) has had a $500 Audio Technica TT for 15 years, and now has about 500 LPs. He doesn’t have a high end system (B&W 20 year old speakers line below the diamond and just a top cuurrent Yamaha AVR). I talked him into getting a Mani phono pre at least.

Anyway, at Christmas I sent a Cambridge 851n streamer dac that I wasn’t using home with him to play with.

Went to visit him a few weeks back and brought one of my unused power amps (Edge W) with to swap in.

First we listened to his setup, and even with my more expensive 851n digital his TT sounded better through the AVR.
When we ran the 851n dac direct into the Edge W, bypassing the Yam, the digital pulled ahead. For some reason the TT through the Mani thru the Yam as preamp to the Edge W didn’t really click.

But anyway, to wrap this up he said for convenience he listens to 80% digital but when he is in the mood for analog the 20% of time he enjoys that most, but carving out the time to be in that mood is the issue

There are verifiable statistics to guide us. In Jan. 2021 vinyl album sales were 27% of all record sales. It's only gone up since.

We're all audiophiles on this forum so we don't care about the invented "Album-equivalent unit" term marketers use to determine the listening habits of those who listen to music on their phones or computer speakers but audiophiles have always been a very small % of the overall market.  Of them however & that group adjacent, buying records in physical forms, vinyl's growth is literally exponential & is on track to eclipse CDs (in the next couple or few years somewhere).  Downloads & streaming complicate things of course but there is a fundamental attraction to the physicality of records & ever larger numbers that once they've heard analog done right cannot easily suppress & deny the reality of the depth of the experience being greater.

I have one friend who listens exclusively to LPs (he has over 10,000 in a $850,000 audio system).   Another who also has that many LPs only listens to CDs for the last 10 years (ease of use for him).   Another who has about 4,000 CDs only burns them to big thumbdrives and listens exclusively to his own CDs.  Most of my friends have extensive collections of both LPs and CDs.  None stream.  We are all over 50 years old.   I also listen to 78s (7,000) occasionally to go with my 7,000 CDs and now 28,500 LPs (added 5,000 in past 3 years from 3 collections-deceased estates).

Several years ago I knew two audiophiles that both played vinyl, and they also had the same speakers and amplifiers. We'll call them #1 and #2, and #1 sold his entire record collection to go 100% digital. Several months later #1 was over # 2's house listening to vinyl, when he realized he could not get the same quality of sound with his digital system.. Needless to say being a true audiophile #1 bought another turntable, and started collecting high quality records again.

For many years now #1 has purchased the highest quality reissued records from Analogue Productions, The Illusive Disc, Music Direct, and high quality used records when reissued ones are not available. In the last fifteen years #1 has purchased about 200 records every year for an expense of about $100 dollars every week, or about $5K a year.

You spend that kind of money on records so you don't have to listen to clicks and pops. On the other hand if you don't know how to take care of a high quality record collection, or do not want to put the effort in, vinyl is not for you.

Back in the 80's there were thousands of audiophiles searching thrift shops and garage sales for Mercury Living Presence albums, RCA Shaded Dog albums, Decca, London, Lyrita, and other sought after manufactured albums , that were recommended in The Absolute Sound. It was a lesson in futility because when you did find a few of these recommended albums they usually were full of ticks and pops. Many times these records would appear to be perfect, but were noisy because they were played on a turntable that was set up improperly, without the proper tools.

In the early 90's RCA and Mercury started issuing albums of most of the sought after music that was recommended by The Absolute Sound, but this time digitally on CD's. Big corporations were out to kill vinyl in the mid to late 80's by offering to buy back CD albums from record stores if they did not sell. Up unto this point record stores had to eat vinyl if it did not sell, so they had blow out sales on their left over vinyl, and that was the end of new vinyl for about five or ten years.

So in the early 90's most audiophiles gave up on vinyl and started buying highly sought after music digitally on these newly available CD's. After all why wear out your car running all over hell and back looking for records that were not there. Some extremely stubborn audiophiles did just that, and sometimes found a few good records, but they mostly wore out their cars for no reward or very little. Mind you these guys were looking for records that cost anywhere from 25 cents to a few dollars.  

These guys would never pay the cost of these high quality newly reissued extremely quiet vinyl records, but did not think anything about the cars that they ran into the ground looking for a bargain.   OK, so I was one of the fools that searched for used records before these high quality reissued records became available. Now for the last twenty some years I've accumulated a fabulous record collection just by getting on my computer and spending.