The rise and fall of CD sales in the U.S.

The media or formats used to sell music have been continuously renewed over the last four decades. From vinyl records, we have moved to music streaming services, which have an increasing number of subscribers, passing through a wide variety of additional systems.

One of them is the CD. For years – especially in the late 90s and early this century – it became the great medium of the music industry, today CD sales continue to fall year after year, as can be seen in the following chart prepared by Statista based on the data offered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on music sales in the United States.

In 2000, 943 million CDs were sold in the United States, which was the highest figure reached by this format. Since then, annual units sold have decreased by 90% (99 million CDs in 2016).

In 2016, revenues generated by streaming services already represented 51% of total sales in the music sector in the United States.

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