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Vinyl and CD: sources and method

RIAA US Revenue Database, official embedded Tableau Download view, retrieved 22 October 2026. LP/EP and CD, CPI Adjustment divided by one billion. 86 complete annual source observations; no cumulative sum or missing-value fill. Source inflation adjustment to 2025 dollars is retained, not independently reconstructed. Wholesale revenue throughout, not retail spending, unit counts or listening activity. Historical estimates may be revised. Excludes second-hand sales, singles, other physical formats and streaming. Annual transitions are animated, not additional measurements. The latest historical unit cells are empty and are not used. Separate 2025 and H1 2026 unit counts in the article are explicitly outside this dataset. Full supporting notes: /examples/vinyl-cd-20261023/sources.html

RIAA US Revenue Database · Official data download · Selected annual figures (CSV).

Reading the figures

The animation uses annual US wholesale album revenue in billions of 2025 dollars. Its fixed vertical scale preserves the size of the CD peak rather than enlarging the final comeback to the same height. The curves keep both current values visible even when the gap becomes very large. The selected formats are not the entire music market. Annual values, rather than cumulative sales, show the disappearance and return. The latest download’s Units cells are blank; they are never filled from guesses or blended into the revenue series.

2025 revenues round to $1,042.9 million for vinyl and $312.4 million for CDs, matching the RIAA year-end report published 16 March 2026. That report separately gives 46.8 million vinyl units and 29.5 million CDs. The H1 2026 report gives 26.5 million and 17.5 million, respectively. Half-year figures are kept outside the full-year chart.

Selected checkpoints

Year	Vinyl ($B, 2025)	CD ($B, 2025)
1983	3.3112	0.0317
1986	1.7513	1.5601
1987	1.3632	2.5789
1999	0.0373	14.1425
2005	0.0142	9.9028
2006	0.0152	8.5469
2007	0.0216	6.6076
2019	0.4049	0.4430
2020	0.5309	0.3413
2025	1.0429	0.3124

Image credits

CD: Liamz2r — Public domain. Source and rights. Unmodified source rendition, cropped/scaled by native editor.
Vinyl: The original uploader was Andrikkos at Greek Wikipedia. — Public domain. Source and rights. Unmodified source rendition, cropped/scaled by native editor.
background: János Venczák — Unsplash License. Source and rights. Native full-frame crop and opacity, chosen for the tonearm and record.

Background photo is scaled, positioned and faded in ChartGlow; series images are illustrative identification assets. No AI-generated imagery is used. No affiliation or endorsement is implied.

Reuse and attribution

Selected factual observations attributed to RIAA; no new licence over RIAA publications or the full underlying database is claimed. ChartGlow provides the selected figures and editable chart for exploration. Images have separate rights: turntable photograph by János Venczák, Unsplash License; vinyl illustration by Andrikkos and CD scan by Liamz2r, public domain as documented on Wikimedia Commons. Sources and credits linked from the analysis.