CD sales climbed sharply in the United States during the first half of 2026, rising 16% year-on-year, according to NME’s report on Luminate’s 2026 Midyear Report.
Luminate said 16.3 million CDs were sold nationwide between January and the end of June. Vinyl sales also increased, but by a much smaller 2.4% during the same period. Even so, vinyl remained the larger format by volume, with 21.8 million albums sold. Around 205,000 cassettes were also purchased.
Combined sales of CDs, vinyl and cassettes reached about 38.2 million units, up 7.8% from the first half of 2025. Luminate said the CD boost was helped by “collection building,” “price accessibility” and a busy schedule of K-pop releases, including BTS’ comeback album ARIRANG.
The report also noted that the trend is not limited to K-pop. When K-pop sales were removed from the data, US CD purchases were still up 6.7% compared with the same period last year. Luminate said about half of Gen Z and millennial CD buyers do not own a CD player, suggesting many are buying physical music as collectibles as much as for listening.
Streaming continued to grow alongside physical music sales, with US on-demand audio streams up 4.8% to 732.7 billion in the first half of the year, while global streams rose 9.8% to 2.8 trillion.
