You Have to Flip It

Luminate’s 2026 midyear report, covered by Billboard and by NME, put US physical album sales at 38.2 million for the first half of the year, up 7.8 percent from 35.5 million. Vinyl albums were 21.8 million, up 2.4 percent. CDs were 16.3 million, up 16 percent. Take the K-pop sales out and Luminate still had US CDs up 6.7 percent. Cassettes were about 205,000. The Verge, talking to Luminate’s Denise Schenasi, reported the company’s note that approximately half of Gen Z and millennial CD buyers do not own a CD player. Total album sales, physical plus digital downloads, were up 5 percent to 44.5 million. Digital album purchases fell 8 percent, to 6.2 million.

The RIAA’s mid-year revenue report, a different document, counts dollars. Wholesale revenue from physical formats rose 25.9 percent, from $581.2 million in the first half of 2025 to $731.5 million. Vinyl revenue was $543.8 million, up 17.7 percent. CD revenue was $171.1 million, up 58.6 percent. A 26 percent story and a 7.8 percent story can both be true if one is money and the other is units, and if vinyl’s price and CD’s sudden jump are doing different work. The earlier version of this page collapsed them into a single Luminate revenue figure. Luminate published the units. The RIAA published the money.

The player-less CD buyer is the detail that changes the moral. Playback is one job a disc can have. A gift, a tour edition, a shelf, a variant you bought because you were in the shop, are other jobs. Some of those jobs are vanity, and vanity is allowed to fund a pressing. The snobbery that insists a format only counts if you use it the canonical way was the same snobbery that, a few years earlier, could not count a download as a real copy. Use is various. The numbers above are the part you can check. A Target exclusive and a shop exclusive are still different doors, with a different cut of the money. The report does not name your shop. It does say the object, counted in millions, came back in both plastic and wax, and that a large share of the people buying the plastic may never put it in a tray.

Sources

• Billboard on Luminate’s 2026 midyear rankings: physical album sales up 7.8 percent to 38.2 million.
• NME: CDs up 16 percent to 16.3 million, vinyl up 2.4 percent to 21.8 million, about 205,000 cassettes.
• The Verge: approximately half of Gen Z and millennial CD buyers do not own a player, per Luminate.
• RIAA mid-year 2026 revenue report: physical revenue up 25.9 percent to $731.5 million.