The compact disc, long written off as a casualty of streaming, is having a moment. New figures from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) show CD revenue in the United States hit $171.1 million in the first half of 2026 — a 58.6% jump from roughly $107.9 million in the same period of 2025.
Unit sales tell a similar story: 17.5 million CDs sold in H1 2026, up 45.7% from about 12 million a year earlier.
Why the rebound is surprising
Because 2025 was a bad year for the format. The RIAA’s full-year report showed CD revenue falling 7.8%, from $338.9 million in 2024 to $312.4 million in 2025, while units dropped 11.6%, from 33.3 million to 29.5 million.
One caveat worth flagging for anyone quoting these numbers in a deck: the RIAA changed its dollar methodology in 2025, moving from estimated retail value to wholesale value. That makes 2024 and 2025 revenue figures not directly comparable. Unit sales, which aren’t affected by the change, still confirm the underlying trend — CDs were declining right up until this year’s turn.
The wider physical media category is climbing too. Physical revenue in H1 2026 rose 25.9% to $731.5 million, powered by the CD surge plus a 17.7% increase in vinyl revenue.
The retro tech wave behind it
CDs aren’t an isolated case. As TechCrunch notes, demand is rising across a cluster of “simpler” technologies: dumbphones, digital cameras, typewriters, landlines and physical media. For Gen Z, these products stand in for an era they never lived through — one where you decided when technology got your attention, rather than notifications, addictive apps and algorithms deciding for you.
A startup ecosystem has formed around that instinct. Landline players include Tin Can, Ooma and Pinwheel. On the non-smartphone side there’s Light, Dumb Co and Minimal, plus the soon-to-launch, BlackBerry-style Clicks. Meanwhile, younger consumers are hunting old gadgets in thrift stores and on resale platforms like eBay and vintage tech site Retrospekt.
The RIAA numbers may even understate the shift, since they exclude used CD sales from thrift bins and garage sales, and don’t capture the discs Gen X parents have simply handed down to their kids.
Why it matters for marketers
This is not a music-industry story. It is a signal about how a generation is negotiating its relationship with attention — and that has direct consequences for media planning, product design and brand experience.
- Scarcity is a feature again. A limited physical run — a disc, a zine, a cassette, a print lookbook — creates a collectible object in a feed economy where everything is infinite and disposable.
- “Offline” is a positioning, not a gap. Brands that offer a break from notification overload can own a value proposition streaming and social platforms structurally cannot.
- Nostalgia works even without memory. Gen Z is buying an idea of the 1990s and 2000s, not a personal memory of it. Aesthetic cues matter more than accuracy.
- Merch is media. If fans are paying for objects again, packaging, liner-note-style storytelling and physical unboxing become owned channels.
- Resale is a discovery channel. Thrift and vintage platforms are where the trend is actually being lived. Plan for it.
The practical takeaway: before you brief another purely digital activation for a young audience, ask whether a tangible artefact would earn more attention per rupee. The CD rebound suggests it might.
Source: TechCrunch
