US CD sales in 2021 rose for the first time in nearly two decades, according to data released by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Shipments rose from $31.6 million in 2020 to $46.6 million in 2021, while format revenue rose from $483.2 million to $584.2 million. The RIAA figures confirm a similar MRC Data report released earlier this year.
While CD sales are still far from their 2000 peak of almost a billion CDs sold in the US, Axios notes that this increase is another key element of the physical music renaissance. Vinyl sales have been steadily rising for over a decade and a half, reaching 39.7 million units in the US in 2021, generating $1 billion in revenue.
The largest source of US revenue in 2021 was $8.6 billion in paid subscriptions. Image: RIAA
This combination means that sales of physical media as a whole have increased for the first time since 1996, but streaming remains dominant. Paid subscriptions generated 57.2% of the $8.6 billion RIAA-measured revenue in 2021, while ad-supported streams generated $1.8 billion. Meanwhile, CD and vinyl album sales combined accounted for less than 11 percent of revenue.
Personally, I’ll be very interested to see if this CD resurgence continues as the world emerges from a two-year lockdown from the pandemic. CDs are great for listening to music at home, but I haven’t seen anyone carry a bulky portable CD player around in years. And while vinyl offers great sound compared to digital music, CDs contain digital music that is essentially identical to what Apple and Amazon’s lossless music services offer (although, crucially, not Spotify).
On the other hand, CDs still offer what purely digital services can only dream of: a beautiful physical object with album art and a real sense of ownership. Also, it feels like more of your money goes directly to the artist, rather than the pennies offered per performance by the streaming corporations.