CD Revenue Jumped 58.6% in Six Months, and K-Pop Fans Get Most of the Credit

Nobody was supposed to be buying CDs in 2026. US CD revenue hit $171.1 million in the first half of the year, up 58.6% from $107.9 million in the same six months of 2025, according to the RIAA's mid-year report. Shipments rose 45.7% to 17.5 million discs. Labels moved $312.4 million worth of CDs in all of 2025, so the format cleared more than half of last year's entire haul before July.

That is a real number and a small one. Physical formats account for 12% of US recorded music revenue. CDs on their own are under 3%. Streaming took 82% of the money, and streaming's six-month increase of $219 million was bigger than the entire CD business. Keep the scale in mind. What changed is who is buying, and that has a specific answer.

What the RIAA report shows

Total US recorded music revenue for the first half of 2026 came in at $5.97 billion, up 6.9%. Streaming did $4.89 billion of that, up 4.7%. Physical formats hit $731.5 million, up 25.9%, with vinyl at $543.8 million (up 17.7% on 26.5 million units) and CDs at $171.1 million. These are wholesale dollars, net of returns, so they track what labels shipped rather than what shoppers rang up.

Downloads fell 12.7% to $121 million, which means CDs now earn more than every paid download format combined: singles, albums, ringtones, all of it. Vinyl still brings in more than three times what CDs do.

The format was still shrinking last year

CD revenue fell 7.8% in 2025, to $312.4 million from $338.9 million in 2024, and units dropped 11.6% to 29.5 million from 33.3 million. Six months later the same format is up almost 59%. Whatever is going on here started recently.

K-pop fans are doing most of the lifting

Luminate's mid-year numbers put US CD sales up 16% to 16.3 million units, against 2.4% growth for vinyl. Take K-pop out of the count and CD sales are up 6.7%. Seven of the ten best-selling CDs of the half were K-pop releases: BTS's Arirang led with 567,000 copies, then Enhypen's THE SIN : VANISH at 286,000 and two ATEEZ Golden Hour records at 263,000 and 212,000. Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo and KATSEYE were the only acts in the top ten not counted as K-pop. Luminate also has mass-market retail taking nearly 30% of physical sales, which is where fandom buying tends to land.

Price is part of it. Digital Music News points out that CDs typically retail for a third to half the price of a new vinyl record, which makes the disc the cheap way to own an album as an object.

The two data sets do not agree on how big any of this is. The RIAA has CD units up 45.7% to 17.5 million. Luminate has them up 16% to 16.3 million. They measure different things: the RIAA counts label shipments at wholesale value net of returns, Luminate counts sales it tracks at retail. Both point up. One points up a lot more steeply.

The rest of the retro run

TechCrunch set the CD numbers alongside a broader run on old technology: dumbphones, digital cameras, typewriters, landlines. Pinwheel launched a retro-inspired landline for kids in July. Tin Can sells a screen-free kids' phone that went viral this spring, and Ooma sells home phone service. Light, Dumb Co and Minimal all build phones designed to do less. Clicks Technology showed the Clicks Communicator at CES in January, a small Android phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard, from a team that includes a former BlackBerry designer. Retrospekt sells refurbished vintage gear.

TechCrunch reads the demand as Gen Z reaching for an era of tech it never got to use, one where you chose when to engage instead of getting pulled in by notifications and feeds. A CD fits that description better than most objects. It plays the album in the order the artist put it in, and then it stops.

What would make this a trend

Headphonesty has argued that the comeback framing does not survive scrutiny, and that the growth could be a sugar high riding a handful of blockbuster releases. The second half of 2026 is where that gets tested. Vinyl needed 19 straight years of growth to clear $1 billion. CDs have had six months.

The number to watch is Luminate's K-pop-adjusted figure. At 6.7%, that is a small format growing modestly, which still beats shrinking. Everything above it belongs to one fandom's buying habits, and fandoms move on.