US CD Sales Rose 58.6% While Downloads Fell 12.7%
6 min read
An independent record shop trading movies, music and games in Silver Spring, Maryland
An independent record shop trading movies, music and games in Silver Spring, Maryland
US CD sales rose 58.6% in the first half of 2026, to $171.1 million, and in doing so quietly passed a milestone nobody had scheduled: for the first time in the streaming era, the compact disc earned American labels more money than paid downloads did. The RIAA’s 2026 Mid-Year Recorded Music Revenue Report, published on 1 September, puts total download revenue at $121.0 million against the CD’s $171.1 million. A year earlier the order was reversed, and not narrowly: downloads took $138.6 million while CDs managed $107.9 million.
The headline number for the industry as a whole is $5.97 billion, up 6.9% year on year, but the interesting story is underneath it. Every major category grew, which is rare enough. What is rarer is the shape of the growth: the fastest-rising line in the whole report belongs to a format the business spent fifteen years writing off.
What the RIAA Actually Counted
One qualifier matters before any of these figures are used in an argument. The RIAA table is headed United States Wholesale Dollar Value (In Millions, net after returns). That is what the labels received, not what the public spent, and it is calculated after unsold stock is sent back. It is a narrower measure than a retail sales figure and a much narrower one than a consumption metric, and it makes the physical lines more conservative than they look.
Within that frame, the half-year splits as follows. Streaming took $4.89 billion, up 4.7%, and accounts for 82% of everything. Physical formats took $731.5 million, up 25.9%. Downloads took $121.0 million, down 12.7%. Sync licensing, the money paid to place recordings in film, television and advertising, took $231.8 million, up 18.2%.
Set against last year that is a genuine re-acceleration rather than a continuation. As Music Ally noted, the equivalent 2025 mid-year report showed overall US growth of just 0.9%. Going from 0.9% to 6.9% in twelve months is the sort of swing that usually requires either a pricing event or a format story. This half had both.
The Disc Passed the Download
The crossover is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to overstate. The CD did not overtake vinyl, and it did not overtake anything meaningful in streaming. It overtook the download bundle: single downloads, album downloads, ringtones and ringbacks, and the residual category the RIAA files as other digital. All four of those lines fell.
Single downloads dropped 13.7% in value to $49.1 million on 51.9 million units, themselves down 13.0%. Album downloads fell 3.0% to $53.8 million. Ringtones and ringbacks, still a line item in 2026, fell 21.2% to $1.6 million. Other digital fell hardest of all, down 32.0% to $16.4 million. Together they make $121.0 million, or 2.0% of the market, against the CD’s 2.9%.
Neither number is large. But downloads and CDs have been telling opposite stories for three years now, and the point at which the lines cross is the point at which the industry can stop describing the CD as a legacy format in run-off. A format in run-off does not add $63 million of wholesale revenue in twelve months.
The Price per Disc Went Up, Not Just the Pile
The most useful detail in the RIAA table is one it does not comment on. CD units rose 45.7%, from 12.0 million to 17.5 million. CD revenue rose 58.6%. Revenue growing thirteen points faster than volume means the average wholesale price per disc went up, from roughly $8.99 to roughly $9.78 — an increase of about 8.8%.
That is the opposite of what a clearance-driven recovery looks like. If the growth were retailers shifting old stock, price per unit would fall. Instead labels are getting more per disc, which points at what is actually being sold: deluxe editions, variant packaging, signed and numbered runs, and the collector-facing releases where the disc is the physical token rather than the playback medium.
Vinyl went the other way over the same period. Units rose 20.9% to 26.5 million while revenue rose 17.7% to $543.8 million, so the average wholesale price per record slipped about 2.3%, from roughly $21.00 to roughly $20.52. Vinyl’s growth this half was volume; the CD’s was volume and price together.
Vinyl Still Earns Three Times as Much
Percentages flatter the small. At $543.8 million, vinyl earned 3.2 times what the CD earned, and it has now spent long enough at the top of the physical business to have its own supply chain, its own retail week and its own release-day rituals. The CD has none of that back yet.
The unit comparison is where it gets interesting. Vinyl moved 26.5 million units, CDs 17.5 million — a gap of nine million, on a format that costs less than half as much per unit at wholesale. And the third physical line, the one the RIAA calls other physical and which is largely cassette, grew fastest of all in units at 73.4%, reaching 1.6 million and $16.5 million.
Taken together, physical revenue of $731.5 million is now six times the entire download business. For a decade the standard framing was that physical media would be the last thing to go, after downloads. The order has reversed, and the reversal is not close.
Streaming Grew, but Two of Its Four Lines Shrank
Streaming’s 4.7% is a composite, and the components disagree. Premium paid subscriptions grew 7.8% to $3.11 billion on 111.1 million subscriber units, up 5.5%. Free, ad-supported streaming grew 3.7% to $899.6 million. But non-premium paid subscriptions — the cheaper tiers, bundled and limited plans — fell 9.0% to $239.1 million, and the residual other streaming line fell 2.1% to $639.4 million.
The premium split is the one to watch. Revenue up 7.8% on units up 5.5% means revenue per subscriber rose about 2.2% across the half, from roughly $27.43 to roughly $28.02 in wholesale terms. That is price increases reaching the labels rather than being absorbed by the platforms, and it is doing roughly a third of premium streaming’s growth on its own.
The RIAA’s own framing leans on breadth rather than any single line. “These results point to a healthy, diversified marketplace supporting continued investment in artists and new ways for audiences to experience music,” said VP of research Matt Bass. Chairman and chief executive Mitch Glazier put it in terms of the label relationship, telling The Music Universe that “as US music revenues continue to grow across formats, labels are strengthening connections between artists, fans and the platforms delivering creative work.”
What Luminate’s Numbers Add
The RIAA is not the only count, and the second one is a useful check. Consequence reported that Luminate, which tracks consumer sales rather than wholesale receipts, found US CD sales up 16% to 16.3 million units in the first half of 2026, with vinyl up 2.4%.
The two datasets are not measuring the same thing and should not be reconciled into one number. What they agree on is direction, and Luminate adds the causal detail the RIAA report omits. K-pop is a substantial part of the story, driven by collectible packaging and multiple album variants of the same release — which is also the most plausible explanation for that rising wholesale price per disc. But it is not the whole story: with K-pop releases stripped out, Luminate still found CD sales up 6.7%.
That residual is the number that decides whether this is a trend or a genre effect. A K-pop-only rise would be a packaging strategy showing up in a national dataset. A rise that survives the removal of K-pop is a broader change in what a certain kind of listener is willing to buy — the same impulse that took vinyl from novelty to infrastructure, arriving a decade later at the format that replaced it and was replaced in turn. Our recent piece on Laufey putting her holiday series on vinyl for the first time is the same instinct viewed from the artist’s side.
Why the Comeback Is Smaller Than the Percentage
Scale discipline is required here. US CD sales of $171.1 million represent 2.9% of a $5.97 billion market. Streaming is 82% of it. If the CD grew another 58.6% next half it would still be under $272 million, which is half of what vinyl earns today and about a third of one quarter of premium subscription revenue.
What the number does change is the planning assumption. A label deciding whether to press discs for a release has spent years treating the CD as a cost centre justified by a small superfan segment. A 58.6% wholesale increase with a rising price per unit reframes that as a margin opportunity, and margin opportunities get manufacturing capacity, retail placement and marketing budget in a way that nostalgia does not.
The honest summary of the half is that all three revenue engines fired at once — streaming with 4.7%, physical with 25.9%, sync with 18.2% — and only the download stack, a format with no packaging, no object and no collector value, kept falling. The formats holding their ground are the ones you can put on a shelf and the ones you never have to think about. It is the middle, the paid file you own but cannot hold, that has run out of reasons to exist.
About The Author
