Last week we wrote about why people are buying vinyl again — a story with an unambiguous answer: eighteen consecutive years of growth, with no signs of stopping. The CD story is more complicated. And more interesting.

CDs never had vinyl's cultural cachet. They didn't benefit from the same nostalgia cycle. No one puts a "CD collection" on their dating profile. And yet, quietly and somewhat surprisingly, the format is showing genuine signs of life in 2026 — driven by demographics and motivations that nobody predicted.

Let's not oversell it. CDs are not back the way vinyl is back. In 2025, U.S. CD revenue fell 7.8% to $312.4 million, and unit sales dropped 11.6% to 29.5 million — while vinyl crossed $1 billion in revenue for the first time, moving 46.8 million units. The "CD comeback" narrative that circulated in 2023 and 2024 was, in the U.S. at least, mostly wishful thinking layered on top of a slowdown in decline rather than actual growth.

But then something shifted. In the first half of 2026, Luminate reported U.S. CD sales jumped 16% year-over-year to 16.3 million units — comfortably outpacing vinyl's 2.4% growth over the same period. That's not a blip. That's a real number, and it deserves a real explanation.

The 2025 U.S. picture was genuinely weak. Revenue down nearly 8%, units down nearly 12%. But zoom out globally and the story looks different. Global physical music revenues reached a decade-high of $2.1 billion in 2025, with CDs contributing $1.1 billion — more than half. The UK saw its third consecutive year of CD revenue growth. Japan, the world's largest physical music market, shipped 58.3 million CD units in 2025 — nearly four times U.S. volume.

The 2026 U.S. turnaround is striking precisely because it comes after a bad year. And critically, even when K-pop — a significant driver of the surge — is removed from the calculation, U.S. CD sales still rose 6.7%. That's the most important number in this story. It means the current growth isn't just a statistical artifact of one genre's release calendar. Something broader is happening.

Here's the part that genuinely surprised us: in 2024, Gen Z became the demographic buying more CDs than Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. A generation with no personal nostalgia for the format, no memory of the CD era at its peak, is now its fastest-growing buyer segment.

A Luminate survey found that 34% of Gen Z music fans purchased at least one physical CD in the past 12 months — up from 22% in 2023. The average Gen Z CD buyer spent $47.80 on physical music in 2025, a 28% increase over 2022. And in 2026, 60% of Gen Z listeners report that they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older — up from just 18% in 2021.

These aren't people who grew up with CD players. They're people who grew up on streaming, who have never owned anything, and who are now actively seeking out physical music — for many of the same reasons they're buying vinyl, but at a lower price point and with a different aesthetic appeal.

Any honest conversation about the CD's 2026 numbers has to address K-pop. The genre has built one of the most sophisticated physical music collector cultures in the world — elaborate packaging, multiple variant editions, photo cards, fan engagement mechanics built around physical ownership. BTS's tenth studio album ARIRANG was a major driver of the H1 2026 surge, and K-pop broadly contributed an estimated $62 million in incremental CD revenue in Asia-Pacific in H1 2026 alone.

But as noted above, strip K-pop out entirely and U.S. CD sales still grew 6.7%. The genre is an accelerant, not the engine. What K-pop has done more broadly is demonstrate a model — limited editions, variant packaging, collectible photo cards, premium pricing — that other artists and labels are now actively adopting. Taylor Swift released four CD editions of The Life of a Showgirl in 2025. Limited-edition CDs now command an average 78.6% price premium over standard editions, with the limited-edition sub-segment growing at 6.2% annually.

The U.S. narrative on CDs has always been skewed by the fact that Americans largely abandoned the format faster than anyone else. But globally, CDs never went away in the same way. Japan remains the world's dominant physical music market, shipping 58.3 million CD units in 2025 — nearly four times U.S. volume — underpinned by a deeply embedded retail culture and a collector mindset that never broke faith with physical media.

The UK has seen three consecutive years of CD revenue growth since 2023's first rebound. BPI data shows 12.4 million CD albums sold in the UK in 2025, a 5.1% increase, with Q1 2026 tracking even higher. Vinyl is set to surpass CDs in the UK by the end of 2026 — but the fact that CDs are growing at all, in the streaming era, in a market that had all but written them off, is remarkable.

Vinyl gets the cultural credit, but CDs have real practical advantages that don't disappear because the format fell out of fashion. The sound quality is excellent — digital audio at 44.1kHz/16-bit, stored losslessly, played back without the surface noise, warping risk, or setup complexity that vinyl requires. For a lot of music — live recordings, orchestral works, dense studio productions — a well-mastered CD sounds extraordinary.

The price point matters too. A new CD typically runs $15–$20. A new vinyl LP is $30–$50 or more. For a fan who wants to own music physically and support an artist directly, a CD is a more accessible entry point — and approximately half of Gen Z and Millennial CD buyers don't even own a CD player. They're buying the object as a form of fandom and ownership, not primarily as a listening medium.

And then there's the car. CD players disappeared from new vehicles over the past decade, but a significant portion of the existing car fleet still has one. For a lot of people, the car is the last place they listen to CDs — and it remains a genuinely good listening environment for the format.

When the vinyl revival took off, a lot of independent record shops deprioritized CDs or dropped them entirely. We didn't. We've always carried a full CD selection alongside our vinyl, and we think that's the right call — not just commercially, but philosophically.

Physical music is physical music. The impulse to own a record, to hold it, to display it, to have something that represents your connection to an artist — that impulse doesn't care what format it comes in. Some people want vinyl. Some people want CDs. Some people want both. Our job is to carry what our customers want, packed carefully and shipped fast, regardless of which plastic disc it's pressed on.

The 2026 numbers are telling us that more people want CDs than the narrative suggested. We're not surprised. We've been watching it happen from the shop floor for a while now. Browse our full CD catalog or check out the latest new releases — there's a lot worth owning right now.

Is the CD making a comeback? In 2026, for the first time in a while, the honest answer is: maybe. The U.S. numbers are moving in the right direction. The global picture was never as bleak as the headlines suggested. And the people buying CDs right now — younger, intentional, collector-minded — are exactly the kind of buyers who sustain a format for the long term. We'll be watching. And stocking.