CD sales are booming as physical music makes a comeback

[Shadow1980]

I just bought a CD from Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago. They're still readily available at various retailers, both brick & mortar and online. Same for vinyl. Looking at album sales in general during the 2000s & 2010s, you'd assume the line would just continue to decline to zero. But that's not what happened. The decline stopped, and there's been a rebound from the late 2010s lows. According to the RIAA, last year there were 46.8M vinyl records and 29.5M CDs sold in just the U.S., for a total of 76.3M units, up from the all-time low of 56.8M units in 2020. According to the IFPI (the international music industry trade association the RIAA is party to), worldwide physical music sales amounted to $5.3B in revenue in 2025, up from the all-time low of $3.7B in 2020. So, proportionally speaking there has been a significant rebound in physical music sales. The industry is still dominated by digital distribution (primarily streaming music these days), but physical is still holding on as a strong niche. Interestingly, digital never became a majority of sales for whole albums. What digital did was simply transition people's buying habits from buying albums to buying digital singles, and now to mainly streaming (which is a kind of substitute for radio). Digital albums were only 16.4% of album sales last year in the U.S. When people want to buy a whole album, they overwhelmingly choose physical.

It's almost like people still like actually owning things, even if only as an option (take note, video games industry). They may be pickier with their purchases because they have the option to be pickier. Buying a whole $10-15 CD for just one or two songs you like only to find you didn't like much of the rest meant buying albums based just on the singles is a big risk. Also, it's likely that many if not most people only wanted the singles but CDs were more cost-effective than buying the single (which often cost upward of half the price of the album). But then iTunes came out and you could buy just the one or two singles you like for $1 a piece. Also, music is often listened to on the go, and digital has a definite edge, as you could carry hundreds of mp3s on a single device, and now you can stream whatever songs you like with custom playlists. But people still love physical albums, and are buying somewhere to the tune (heh) of a couple hundred million units per year.