Compact discs are rapidly falling out of use, clinging to the market mainly in some separate segments or regions. However, last year, at least for music discs, turned out to be very atypical.
The annual report of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says that sales of music CDs in the US last year increased from 31.6 to 46.6 million, that is, almost 50%! Revenue, however, did not grow so much: from 483.2 to 584.2 million dollars. But the important thing is that 2021 was the first year in so many years that music CD sales increased. To be more precise, the last time this happened was in 2004. If you count all physical music media, their sales have shown growth for the first time since 1996!
To understand just how much sales have fallen in these 20 years, suffice it to say that at the end of the last century (and millennium) and the beginning of the current year, music CD sales were about 1 billion units a year, and revenues were well over $10 billion.
But sales of vinyl records have been growing for more than 15 years. Last year, 39.7 million records were sold in the US, worth about $1 billion.
Source: ixbt
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