CD Sales Rise 58% as Part of Physical Media Resurgence
The compact disc, a format the music industry had more or less made peace with losing, is selling again. Not in a nostalgic, novelty-item way either. The numbers from the first half of 2026 are real enough that they're changing how labels think about what to press.
According to a mid-year report from the Recording Industry Association of America, CD revenue hit $171.1 million in the first half of the year, up 58.6 percent from about $107.9 million over the same stretch in 2025. Units sold rose 45.7 percent, to 17.5 million discs, up from roughly 12 million, per figures first reported by TechCrunch.
What makes the jump stand out is how recently the format was still fading. CD revenue dropped 7.8 percent across all of 2025, down to $312.4 million from $338.9 million the year before, with units falling 11.6 percent, to 29.5 million. This time last year, CDs were still doing exactly what everyone expected them to do, which was quietly disappear. Then they didn't.
CDs are not the only type of physical media seeing sales rise. Vinyl revenue climbed 17.7 percent, with units up nearly 21 percent, to about 26.5 million, and the RIAA's "other physical" bucket, which lumps in cassettes, SACDs, and whatever else doesn't fit the main categories, jumped more than 73 percent. Physical media revenue overall was up 25.9 percent, to $731.5 million, for a corner of the business that spent the last fifteen years being treated as a rounding error.
Separately, the analytics firm Luminate clocked CD sales up 16 percent, to 16.3 million units, over the same period. Some of that is K-pop doing what K-pop does, BTS's tenth album, ARIRANG, moved serious numbers on disc, but Luminate found sales were still up nearly 7 percent with K-pop pulled out of the equation.
A good chunk of the growth is coming from listeners who never owned a CD player and aren't buying one now either. Donald Nde Jr., 22, told Axios he picked up his first CD as a tribute to MF Doom, less because he needed a way to play it and more because he wanted to own it. These are listeners who grew up entirely inside streaming, where an album can disappear from a library overnight because of some licensing dispute nobody warned them about. It makes sense that they'd want something a platform can't reach into and pull back.
It's a different engine than the one that drove vinyl's comeback, which mostly ran on people old enough to remember buying records the first time. Most people under 25 buying CDs right now skipped the format completely the first time it was relevant. If there's nostalgia in it, it's for an era they only caught the tail end of, or missed outright, pieced together from old music videos and whatever discs got handed down.
For the ones who never left, the appeal was never that complicated. Rob Sheffield, who kept his CD collection through the years everyone else was unloading theirs, has made the case that the format's real selling point is how little it asks of you. No algorithm queuing up the next track, no app making decisions on your behalf. You put the disc in, and it plays the album the way it was sequenced.
One footnote worth flagging: the RIAA switched its methodology in 2025, from estimated retail value to wholesale value, so revenue figures on either side of that line aren't apples to apples. Unit sales don't have that problem, and they tell the same story regardless, down through 2025, then a hard turn upward this year.
Streaming still accounts for the vast majority of how people listen to music, and none of this changes that. What it does change is the assumption that the CD's story was already finished. For now, at least, it isn't.
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