CD Sales Jumped 45 Percent: The Buyers Are the Generation That Never Used Them

The compact disc, the thing streaming services supposedly buried fifteen years ago, is growing faster this year than any other format category in music. The American recording industry association announced that in the first half of 2026 17.5 million compact discs were sold - 45.7 percent more than in the same period last year, when the figure was around 12 million.

Revenue jumped 58.6 percent, to 171.1 million dollars (around 158 million euros), from about 107.9 million dollars the previous year.

What makes the figure interesting is that it comes immediately after a bad year. Across all of 2025, disc sales fell 11.6 percent - from 33.3 million to 29.5 million units. So the format was not quietly growing in the background. It was falling, and then it turned.

Who is buying them? Mostly the generation that never used them. The same wave that brought back phones without internet, digital cameras, typewriters and landlines. This is not about memories - none of these buyers has a memory of a Discman. It is about a device that ends. A disc that plays and finishes, as against an algorithm that does not stop and knows what to put on next.

There is one correction the industry itself acknowledges. The way revenues are calculated changed in 2025 - from estimated retail to wholesale value - so the 2024 and 2025 figures are not directly comparable. Units sold are unaffected by that change, and they tell the same story.

The figure is also larger than the published one, because it does not count second-hand discs - the ones from flea markets, from garage sales, or the ones parents handed down to their children. All physical music in the first half of the year brought in 731.5 million dollars, up 25.9 percent, with vinyl growing 17.7 percent.

Does this mean streaming is in trouble? No. The disc is still a minor line item in an industry that lives off subscriptions. But it is worth noticing what exactly is growing: not the music you borrow while you keep paying monthly, but the music you keep when you stop paying.