The CD took over. Then vinyl came back.

Put a record beside a compact disc and the story can seem obvious: old technology, followed by its successor. The numbers tell a less tidy tale. The successor became enormous. The older format survived, then reclaimed the lead.

The RIAA’s latest complete year puts vinyl album revenue at $1.04 billion, against $312 million for CDs. Those are US wholesale revenues: money at the record-company level, rather than the total paid at shop tills. They are also annual figures, rather than a running total of everything ever sold.

Rewind the comparison to 1983, the first year with CD revenue in this series, and the balance looks very different.

The mountain belongs to the CD

At the start, vinyl is more than a hundred times larger by revenue. The reversal arrives quickly: CDs move ahead in 1987. Then the gap becomes a gulf.

By 1999, the CD reaches about $14.1 billion in 2025 dollars, its highest point in the period. That towering peak matters. It shows how much bigger the CD business once was than either physical format is now.

Vinyl, meanwhile, sinks almost to the floor. Its 2005 low is roughly $14 million at 2025 prices. On a scale large enough to contain the CD’s peak, the record becomes a thin line along the bottom. The visual disappearance is the point: the later comeback starts from a remarkably small base.

A second crossing, a different world

The lines meet again in 2020, when vinyl regains the revenue lead. By 2025, its advantage is about 3.3 to one.

Higher prices alone cannot explain the latest year’s lead. The RIAA also reports 46.8 million vinyl albums versus 29.5 million CDs in 2025. The revenue gap is wider than the unit gap, so the two measures tell related but different stories. Neither tells us how many people listened, or how often they played an album.

There is another useful reality check: vinyl’s 2025 revenue is still only about a third of its own 1983 level after inflation. Returning to the lead over CDs is a significant comeback within physical music. The wider industry has changed around both of them.

Leave room for another turn

Streaming generated about 82% of US recorded-music revenue in 2025. Vinyl can thrive within that world without recreating the market that existed before the CD.

And the CD has another chapter of its own. In the separate first-half 2026 report, CD units rose 45.7% to 17.5 million; vinyl reached 26.5 million. Those six-month figures are outside the annual chart and cannot settle the full-year result. They do give us a reason to keep watching.

The most revealing part of this race is the long line between the two crossings. A format can lose its place at the centre of the business and still have a future. The old record has found a new place in a very different music industry.