Last week saw Luminate pubish their annual midyear report on trends in music, TV, and film. This year’s report highlights that 2026 has been a particularly good year for the compact disc. The first half of the year saw a spike in CD sales of 16%, vastly overshadowing vinyl’s 2.4% sales increase in the same amount of time.
According to the report, the first half of 2026 saw 16.3 million units moved, signifying a possible CD resurgence. Over all, physical music formats are up across the board with 38.2 million units sold, marking an increase of 7.8% among all formats including LPs, CDs, and cassettes.
Luminate mentions that K-pop has been a major driving factor in the physical format renaissance, with the K-Pop industry pushing limited-edition and collectable albums. However, even when the K-pop market is removed from the metrics, CD sales still show year-over-year growth of 6.7%.
