Just when you think an audio format is dying, it makes a comeback!
it happened with vinyl albums, and now it’s happening with Compact Discs.
(Some of my CD’s reflecting colors.)
Ever since auto manufacturers stopped putting CD players in vehicles, computer manufacturers stopped including CD drives, and most importantly streaming music took over, CD sales have seen an overall decline. But they started a comeback in 2022, and are making another move up this year.
According to the research firm Luminate, CD sales have gone up faster than vinyl…16% the first half of 2026. That compares with a 2.4% increase in vinyl sales. Vinyl still leads in physical sales at 21.8 million units, with CD’s at 16.3 million, and cassettes are still around, with 205 thousand units sold the first six months this year. Overall, sales of music on physical media went up 7.8%.
So why the increases? Music fans want physical souvenirs of their favorite artists, and like actually owning the music. CD’s are the more affordable way to own music, with vinyl albums often priced at about $25, and CD’s normally priced at less than half as much. The fact that CD’s are digital means the songs can easily be loaded into our computers. If you don’t have a CD drive, this will do the job:
It’s an inexpensive Apple CD/DVD drive that lets you play & input CD’s, and also lets you burn songs from your computer onto recordable CD’s. It’s small, not much bigger than a CD case, and the CD’s just slide in the front.
Another indicator that CD’s are making a comeback is the increasing number of players that are now available. They range from high-quality component players to inexpensive little portable players like this one made to look like a turntable:
CD collecting will probably never return to most music fans owning a large number of CD’s like I did at the turn of the century.
As you can see on the right side of this old photo, my floor-standing CD case held hundreds of CD’s.
Before we moved half way across the country to Oregon, we sold most of our albums and CD’s.
Today, we just have a small collection of CD’s and box sets, but we own about 25,000 digital tracks of our favorite artists, and we can listen to what we want from our streaming service. I still buy a small number of CD’s when there are special releases…like those Beatles box sets.