Report: CD Sales In The US Are Up For The First Time In 17 Years
January 7, 2022, 2 years ago
According to Billboard, the vinyl resurgence had a significant impact on how listeners consumed music in 2021, growing by more than half. Yet last year also marked a quiet CD comeback.
Total US album sales increased by 6.3% last year from 2020, totalling 108.98 million (up from 102.48 million), according to MRC Data’s 2021 US Year-End Report. Overall sales grew for the first time in a decade, driven by a 51.4% increase in vinyl sales up to 41.72 million albums from 27.55 million in 2020. And for the first time since MRC Data started tracking music sales in 1991, vinyl albums outsold CD albums for the year.
Even if CDs aren’t the dominant physical format anymore, their 2021 sales give some cause for optimism. For the first time in 17 years, CD album sales increased - up 1.1% to 40.59 million albums sold in 2021, from 40.16 million in 2020. That’s the first yearly gain in CD sales since 2004, when more than 10 times those numbers of CDs were being sold (CD sales increased 4.6% to 665.5 million in 2004, from 636.5 million in 2003).
Helping to drive the overall CD uptick: Adele. Her new album, 30, was both 2021’s top-selling album across all physical and digital formats (1.464 million sold), as well as the top-selling CD album of the year (898,000 sold). Adele’s fourth full-length streaked to the top of the list in just a month-and-a-half of release, after being issued in mid-November, accounting for 2.15% of all CDs sold in the year. Hypothetically, had 30 not been released in 2021, total CD sales would have been down year-over-year.
Read more at Billboard.
