【Watch Selina's Gold Online】

Vinyl sales in the UK reached a record high last year,Watch Selina's Gold Online with over 3.2 million records sold, a rise of 53% on the previous year, according to the BPI (British Phonographic Industry).

The last time vinyl purchases performed so well was in 1991, when Simply Red's Starstopped the annual best-seller charts.

David Bowie's posthumous album Blackstarsold more than double the number of copies of 2015's biggest-seller, Adele's 25.

Bowie, who died in January 2016, had five albums featuring in the top-30 best-sellers, according to the Official Charts.

However, vinyl is still quite a niche product compared to the total music market, accounting for just 2.6% of the overall sales.

Fewer CDs are being bought, with a drop of 11.7% compared to 2015, though it still remains a relatively resilient format with 47.3 million CDs bought.

Download figures have also fallen, with just 18.1 million albums bought online -- a sharp drop of 29.6%.

That's because consumers are increasingly using streaming services like Spotify to enjoy music. An astonishing 45 billion audio streams were served in 2016, representing an increase of more than two-thirds on last year.

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“Fans are listening to music in so many ways now – we’ve definitely entered a multi-channel era," Vanessa Higgins, CEO Regent Street and Gold Bar Records, and an independent label member of BPI Council, said.

"Millennials, who’ve grown up digital, are increasingly choosing to experience both current and heritage artists on vinyl also. Meanwhile older baby-boomers are embracing streaming alongside their record collections."

"And, impressively, in between all that, there is still more than enough space for the CD, which remains popular both with upcoming artists, who need an attractive physical product, and consumers, who still like to gift, collect and own the recordings they love.”

The vinyl resurgence made the news in December when, for the first time, money spent on LPs overtook that spent on digital downloads.

UK record sales figures for vinyl hit £2.4 million ($2.95 million) compared with the £2.1 million made from digital downloads, according to the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), which which used Official Charts data.

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