In its first-half report, released September 1, 2026, the RIAA said US CD shipments reached 17.5 million units, up 45.7% year over year, while wholesale revenue rose 58.6% to $171.1 million. Full-year 2025 CD shipments had fallen 11.6% in unit terms, so the numbers turned sharply in the very next half-year. But Luminate, which counts actual sales over the same period, shows CDs at 16.3 million units, up just 16%, a gap of 29.7 points in growth. Who is actually holding all those extra CDs?
From an 11.6% drop to 17.5 million units in half a year
The RIAA's midyear figures for CDs show how large the swing is compared with the recent trend. US CD shipments were 33.3 million units and $338.9 million for full-year 2024, and 29.5 million units and $312.4 million for full-year 2025. The RIAA's full-year 2025 report puts the decline over that period at 11.6% in units and 7.8% in value. (A simple subtraction of the rounded unit figures gives 11.4%, but the RIAA's original table states 11.6%.) In the first half of 2026, units rose from 12.0 million to 17.5 million, and revenue grew from $107.9 million to $171.1 million. That is 5.5 million additional units in six months.
Two premises are worth keeping in mind when reading this table. The first is the unit of measurement. The RIAA reports figures in US wholesale dollars, net of returns, and shipments from labels to retailers. These are not the amounts consumers paid at the register.
The second is a change in the basis of measurement. Starting with its 2025 report, the RIAA switched from estimated retail value to wholesale value, and it has recalculated 2024 on the same basis. 2024 and 2025 can be compared with each other using the recalculated wholesale figures, but they cannot be directly linked to the older retail-value estimates (2023 and earlier). For long-term trends, unit counts are the safer measure, since they are unaffected by the change.
Even with the growth, CDs occupy a small place in total US recorded music. Total first-half revenue was $5.9749 billion (up 6.9%), of which streaming accounted for $4.8907 billion, or 82%. Paid subscriptions reached 111.1 million, up 5.5%. CD revenue of $171.1 million is just 2.9% of total revenue (171.1 ÷ 5,974.9). Streaming remains the foundation of the structure.
Still, the midyear report drew attention to CDs because their revenue growth rate was the highest of any category. (In unit growth, other physical formats such as cassettes led, up 73.4%.) Vinyl records came in at 26.5 million units and $543.8 million, up 20.9% in units and 17.7% in value. Other physical formats, including cassettes, were 1.6 million units and $16.5 million, up 73.4% in units and 44.9% in value.
Across all physical media, revenue grew 25.9%, from $581.2 million in the same period a year earlier to $731.5 million.
CDs outpacing vinyl in growth rate marks a reversal for the first time since vinyl overtook CDs in revenue in 2020. RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazier said that as US music revenue keeps growing across formats, labels are strengthening the connections among artists, fans, and streaming platforms.
Why do two official statistics differ by 29.7 points?
Luminate measures the same first half of 2026 differently. On a sales basis, CDs were 16.3 million units, up 16%; vinyl records were up 2.4%; and total physical albums were 38.2 million units, up 7.8%. Luminate collects direct sales data, both online and in store, from major retailers and e-commerce, and fills in gaps for independent retailers with statistical modeling. Placed beside the RIAA's shipments, the comparison looks like this:
| Format | Shipments (RIAA) | Sales (Luminate) | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| CD | +45.7% | +16.0% | 29.7 points |
| Vinyl | +20.9% | +2.4% | 18.5 points |
This gap does not mean that one of the surveys is wrong. The RIAA counts units centered on net shipments from labels to retailers (after returns), including direct sales and special channels. Luminate counts direct sales data from retail and e-commerce, that is, units for which orders or in-store purchases have been confirmed, with some independent retail figures estimated. Because the scope of what each survey covers does not fully match and the measurement points differ, they are measuring different quantities even over the same six months.
Several factors could make shipments grow faster than sales. One is stocking up along the distribution chain, in retail shelves and warehouses. If returns occur, they are deducted from the RIAA's shipments in a later period, so goods that were stocked do not vanish but rebound into the next period's figures. However, Luminate's online sales may be recorded at the shipping stage, and the estimates for independent retailers also carry error. Neither the RIAA nor Luminate has stated outright that the gap reflects inventory build-up.
Some evidence hints at where the additional shipments went. According to Billboard's coverage of Luminate's figures, CD sales rose 6.7% even excluding K-pop, so K-pop alone does not explain all of the growth. Still, the most visible driver is multi-version sales design: BTS's album ARIRANG reportedly sold about 567,000 units across five CD versions. This kind of design appears to assume that a single buyer will purchase multiple copies, which lets labels plan shipments for as many versions as they release.
The retail floor has also changed. In Luminate's data, the share of physical album sales held by mass-market retailers (Target and Walmart being typical examples) rose to 28.7%, up 5.4 points from 23.3% a year earlier. The share of independent retailers fell from 36.6% in 2025 to 32.1% in 2026.
Mass-market retailers tend to secure large volumes of limited editions and store-specific bonuses and stock them on shelves in bulk. Once the goods are on the shelf, they count in the RIAA's shipments, whereas they show up in Luminate's data only after sales are confirmed. The combination of this sales design and retail mix explains the 29.7-point gap without much strain, though differences in the scope of the two surveys could produce some gap on their own.
CDs topping paid downloads is not new
First-half 2026 CD wholesale revenue of $171.1 million exceeded total paid downloads of $121.0 million. The download total includes digital sales of songs, albums, ringtones and more, yet CDs alone were larger than the whole. In the same period a year earlier, CDs were $107.9 million and downloads were $138.6 million, so the ranking was reversed in a half-year comparison.
But this is not the first crossover. In the RIAA's annual figures, full-year 2023 saw CDs at $537.1 million against downloads at $434.3 million; full-year 2024 saw CDs at $338.9 million against downloads at $274.8 million; and full-year 2025 saw CDs at $312.4 million against downloads at $272.6 million. On a full-year basis, CDs have outperformed downloads for at least three straight years, from 2023 through 2025. The change in half-year ranking is not a new event in which CDs defeated paid downloads. The pattern that had already occurred on a full-year basis simply showed up in the half-year numbers as well.
That pattern was not produced by CD growth alone. Paid downloads fell 0.8% year over year in full-year 2025 and 12.7% year over year in the first half of 2026, and they keep shrinking. In the same half, download singles fell 13.7% and download albums fell 3.0%; nothing in the RIAA's tables suggests a reversal for a format long replaced by streaming. The two-way movement, with CD revenue up 58.6% and downloads down 12.7%, produced this change in ranking.
In addition to unit volume, rising unit prices also contributed to CD growth. Dividing wholesale revenue by shipped units in the RIAA's table gives a first-half 2026 wholesale price of $9.78 per CD (171.1 ÷ 17.5), compared with $8.99 (107.9 ÷ 12.0) a year earlier. Units rose 45.7% while the unit price rose 8.8%, and the 58.6% revenue increase is the product of the two.
The RIAA's table does not break out the product mix, but the size of the price increase suggests that higher-priced items such as limited editions and multi-version releases made up a meaningful share. It would be hard to explain this increase by flooding the market with cheap catalog titles alone.
The contribution to revenue is even more lopsided. Total first-half revenue rose $387.5 million, from $5.5874 billion in the same period a year earlier to $5.9749 billion. Of that, the increase in physical media was $150.3 million ($731.5 million − $581.2 million), or 38.8% of the added revenue. Physical media account for only 12.2% of total revenue (10.4% a year earlier), yet they generated nearly 40% of the dollars added in the first half.
In absolute terms, streaming's increase of $219.1 million is still the largest, but in contribution relative to size, physical media stand out. Compared with synchronization revenue, which grew 18.2% to $231.8 million in the same half, physical media at $731.5 million were also larger in amount and faster in growth. This alone explains why labels are putting resources into physical inventory.
CDs have a pricing weapon: 47.6% of vinyl's price
The same RIAA table lets us calculate the wholesale unit price of vinyl records. Dividing $543.8 million by 26.5 million units gives $20.52, and the CD's $9.78 is 47.6% of that. At the stage where goods pass from label to retailer, CDs flow at less than half the price of records.
What is being compared here is wholesale unit price, not shelf price. Mix within formats, such as deluxe editions and double LPs, is not adjusted for either. Even so, the figure comes from simply dividing two rows of the same report, covering the same period and the same basis.
The price gap directly affects format choice. An anonymous industry source familiar with indie retail and vinyl, speaking to Loudwire, said, "It's ridiculous to say that one format costing three times as much as the other isn't a factor in choosing the cheaper one." The same source said conditions are not like the pandemic era, when orders took 6 to 12 months to be delivered. For artists on limited budgets, a format with a lower unit cost and predictable lead times is easier to choose.
Manufacturing-side numbers are moving in line with this. Disc Makers, which manufactures CDs for independent artists, says its 2026 CD revenue is up 9% year to date and that April was up 18% from the same month a year earlier. Company CEO Tony van Veen said CDs are coming back not out of nostalgia but because it makes sense, pointing to the format being affordable and tangible for Gen Z. If vinyl occupies the high end of physical media as a $20-plus product, CDs fill the band below it.
Japan, where CDs still hold about 40%, versus 2.7% in the US
Even with the US growth, CDs' share is still small by Japanese standards. The Recording Industry Association of Japan's estimate for the 2025 domestic recorded music market, published March 4, 2026, was ¥398.8 billion, of which CDs accounted for ¥168,619 million, or 42.3%. In the RIAA's data, by contrast, US CD revenue of $312.4 million for full-year 2025 was just 2.7% of the $11.5 billion recorded music total. In the same year, CDs' share of the mix differs by a factor of about 15.
This comparison comes with caveats. The RIAJ's "CD" is the sum of CD singles and CD albums, in a market estimate based on net shipment results after returns. The RIAA's "CD" refers only to full-length albums, and CD singles are booked in a separate category, "other physical." US other physical was very small at $25.8 million for full-year 2025, and even if all of it were treated as CD singles and added in, the US share would only be about 2.9%.
The denominators also do not fully match: Japan's is the sum of music software and music distribution, while the US figure is the RIAA's recorded music total. Amounts themselves therefore cannot be used for international comparison, and only the composition ratios within each country's statistics are compared. Even so, widening the definition of CDs does little to change the roughly 15-fold gap.
In 2025, Japan's music software production was 143.02 million units (101% of the prior year) and ¥215.7 billion (105%). Analog records topped ¥8 billion in value for the first time in 37 years, since 1988. In the domestic recorded music market estimate, music distribution at ¥169,967 million has come in slightly above CDs at ¥168,619 million. In the same estimate, analog discs were ¥8,847 million and music video was ¥50,715 million, so the physical product next in scale after CDs in Japan is not records. That position is held by music video, at a scale equal to about 30% of CDs.
That CDs have kept a 40% share even after streaming took the top spot reflects the fact that a sales design of multiple purchases through multiple versions and bonuses has been built into retail floors and buying behavior over more than 20 years.
The multi-version sales approach that K-pop has brought to the US overlaps with this design, which took hold in Japan earlier. The difference lies in scale and foundation. In Japan, multiple versions were layered on top of a market where CDs remained a main format, whereas in the US, the approach was brought in as a sales design for a specific genre after CDs had shrunk to 2.7%. Even under the same phrase "CD revival," what Japan means is the maintenance of an existing market, while what the US means is localized growth on a smaller field.
Whether the growth is real will be answered by second-half inventory
If the gap between the RIAA and Luminate narrows from the second half of 2026 onward, it would suggest that much of what shipped in the first half was actually sold. If the gap stays open, some of the stocked CDs are likely to be discounted or returned. Because the RIAA's figures are net shipments after returns, any returns will cut into the next period's numbers by that amount. The full-year report, which spans the holiday season, will be the first opportunity to measure how much of the first half's 45.7% was real demand.
There are also points to verify on the demand side. One tally says about half of the Gen Z and millennial consumers who bought CDs do not own a CD player, so the motivation for purchase leans toward ownership and collecting rather than playback. Purchases for ownership depend heavily on artists' activity cycles and the supply of limited editions, and they cool quickly when hit releases run out. On the other hand, the fact that CD sales rose 6.7% even excluding K-pop shows there is some demand outside K-pop. Whether that 6.7% remains in the second half of 2026 will mark the line between collector demand and general demand.
The retail mix also deserves attention. Mass-market retailers account for 28.7% of physical album sales, while independent retailers retreated from 36.6% to 32.1%. Mass-market shelves shrink quickly when inventory turnover falters, and they decide faster than independents. If shelf space shrinks, the very premise on which labels slice releases into multiple versions would collapse.
That CD wholesale revenue exceeded downloads, and that physical media, at 12.2% of revenue, produced 38.8% of the added revenue, are established facts for the first half of 2026. It can be said not to be a one-off only if the full-year report shows the gap between shipments and sales narrowing, the $9.78 unit price level holding, and the 6.7% outside K-pop remaining. If all three line up, CDs will remain a product worth taking inventory risk on for labels, and independent artists will be able to release physical products on their own budgets without waiting for $20-plus records.