Are CDs coming back?

Are CDs coming back? What the numbers say

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) tracks U.S. music revenue by format back to the 1970s. Its U.S. revenue database shows the shape of the CD story clearly:

What the table says:

• The peak was enormous. CD revenue reached $7.55 billion at wholesale in 2000, about $14.1 billion in today’s money by the RIAA’s own inflation adjustment (RIAA U.S. revenue database). The 2025 figure is about 4% of that before inflation.
• The fall stopped around 2020. In 2021, CD revenue rose for the first time since 2004, according to the RIAA’s 2021 year-end report. Since then it has moved up and down within a narrow band instead of shrinking every year.
• 2025 was a down year. The RIAA’s 2025 year-end report shows CD shipments fell 11.6%, from 33.3 million to 29.5 million, and CD revenue fell 7.8% to $312 million.
• Vinyl overtook CDs. Vinyl passed CDs in revenue in 2020. In 2022, vinyl albums outsold CDs in units for the first time since 1987, 41 million to 33 million (RIAA 2022 year-end report). Vinyl stayed ahead in 2023 and 2024 (RIAA 2024 year-end report) and in 2025, 46.8 million units to 29.5 million (RIAA 2025 year-end report).

So by the numbers, CDs haven’t come back the way vinyl has. They’ve found a floor. Roughly 30 million new CDs still ship in the U.S. every year, which is a lot of discs for a format many people assumed was finished.

Physical media is growing, mostly on vinyl

Zoom out to physical music as a whole and the trend is up. The RIAA’s 2025 report puts U.S. physical revenue at $1.38 billion at wholesale, up 5%, with vinyl up 9.3% to $1.04 billion. That’s about 12% of the $11.5 billion U.S. recorded music market; streaming is most of the rest.

Luminate, which tracks sales at the register rather than shipments, tells a similar story. Its 2025 year-end music report counted 82.2 million physical albums sold in the U.S., up 6.5% from 77.2 million, and 47.9 million vinyl albums, up 8.6% for the 19th straight year of growth. Those Luminate figures include its modelled estimate of independent record store sales.

Physical media has stopped being a niche, but it’s vinyl doing the heavy lifting. CDs are the cheaper, smaller sibling holding their ground.

Who's buying CDs

Superfans, especially pop and K-pop fans

The top of the CD chart is dominated by artists with intensely loyal fan bases. In Luminate’s 2025 report, the best-selling CD album in the U.S. was Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl at 1,957,000 copies, and Stray Kids had three of the top six. In 2024, Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department led with 1,512,000 CDs, and seven of the top 10 CD albums were by K-pop acts: Stray Kids, ENHYPEN, ATEEZ, TOMORROW X TOGETHER and TWICE.

K-pop albums are often released in several versions with collectible extras such as photocards, so dedicated fans buy more than one copy. Luminate’s 2025 report estimates that 20% of U.S. music listeners are superfans, people who engage with artists in five or more ways, and buying physical copies is one of those ways.

Online shoppers

Where CDs are bought has shifted too. Luminate found that one in three CDs in 2025 was bought through an e-commerce site, with mass-market stores close behind at 30%.

Gen Z and Millennials

You’ll read a lot about Gen Z discovering CDs. We haven’t found a solid public figure for Gen Z CD buying specifically, so we won’t invent one. What the data does show is younger buyers driving physical music more broadly: Luminate’s 2025 report found Gen Z and Millennials make up almost 80% of people who buy vinyl directly from artists and labels.

Anyone with a CD slot

Then there’s the practical buyer: someone whose car, kitchen stereo or boombox still plays CDs, and who wants music that works without a phone, a signal or a subscription.

Why burned mix CDs are back as gifts

This part comes from our own experience rather than an industry report. We burn custom CD mixtapes from people’s playlists every day, and in our shop the same reasons come up again and again.

• It’s personal. Many of the playlists we burn were built for one person: a partner, a parent, a best friend. A disc makes that choice of songs into something with a cover, a tracklist and a name.
• It’s physical. A playlist link gets buried in a chat. A CD sits on a shelf or in a glovebox for years. The songs stay in the order you chose, and nobody can quietly change them.
• It’s giftable. You can wrap a CD, put a note in the case and hand it over. That’s hard to do with a link.

The mixtape has always been about someone spending time on you. Our guide to what a mixtape is covers how that idea moved from cassettes to mix CDs to playlists, and our nostalgic gift ideas pair well with a burned disc for anyone who grew up with a CD binder.

Where to start with CDs

• Get something to play them on. A portable CD player with headphones, a boombox, or the CD slot in an older car all work. An audio CD plays in all of them.
• Burn your own. If you have a computer with a disc drive, or an external USB burner, our guide to how to burn a CD walks through it on Mac and Windows. Use songs you own: streaming downloads are DRM-protected and can’t be burned.
• Make it a mixtape. Picking and ordering 20 songs is the fun part. Our guide to how to make a mixtape covers the opener, the closer and everything in between.

No burner? Send us your playlist and we’ll burn it to a custom CD mixtape, test-play it and post it to you.

Sources

All figures are for the United States and were checked against these sources on October 7, 2026.

• RIAA, U.S. Revenue Database: CD and vinyl revenue by year at wholesale value, with the inflation-adjusted series.
• RIAA, 2025 Year-End Music Industry Revenue Report: 2025 CD and vinyl units and revenue, total physical and total revenue.
• RIAA, 2024 Year-End Music Industry Revenue Report: vinyl vs CD units, CD revenue at retail value.
• RIAA, 2022 Year-End Music Industry Revenue Report: vinyl outsells CDs in units for the first time since 1987.
• RIAA, 2021 Year-End Music Industry Revenue Report: first rise in CD revenue since 2004.
• Luminate, 2025 Year-End Music Report: physical and vinyl album sales, CD sales by store type, top CD albums, superfans, vinyl buyers.
• Luminate, 2024 Year-End Music Report: top CD albums of 2024.