News

The latest wax stats are in, and the vinyl business is booming. Yesterday, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) released their 2025 Year-End Recorded Music Revenue Report, which confirmed that vinyl sales surpassed $1 billion ($1B) in the U.S. alone in 2025, a figure that also accounts for nearly 50% of our favorite format’s global revenue total.

The RIAA’s year-end report also marks 2025 as the 19th consecutive year that vinyl sales have grown — most recently, they’re up 9.3% over 2024. Not only that, but the act of vinyl acquisitioning led the sales of all physical formats in 2025, accounting for more than 3x the revenue of CDs (i.e., 46.8M LPs sold vs. 29.5M CDs). See the chart below, which shows 2025 numbers in the first column, 2024 numbers in the middle column, and the percentage changes in the third column.

Before we go any further, please refrain from making the obvious, tired jokes about that number being due to sales of Taylor Swift and/or KPop Demon Hunters vinyl variants, and let’s just enjoy vinyl’s ongoing popularity growth for what it is, shall we?

“The last 20 years have been marked by unprecedented transformation for recorded music,” said RIAA Chairman & CEO Mitch Glazier in a press statement, further clarifying that there has been, quote, “a resurgence of vinyl as both a listening experience and collectable art. [. . .] Through it all, music remains a cornerstone of culture and a growing economic powerhouse for the U.S., contributing $212 billion to our GDP and supporting more than 2.5 million American jobs.” Added Matt Bass, RIAA VP Research and Gold & Platinum Operations, “Fans are consuming music from the artists they love in more ways than ever, and that passion is reflected in [yesterday’s] report. 2025 reveals a strong and stable music economy resulting from committed label investment and identification of new spaces to expand artists’ creativity. From the ease of streaming to new vinyl [. . . fans continue] to listen to and connect with their favorite music whenever, wherever, and however they want.”

On the bigger-picture sales front, the RIAA also confirmed that U.S. wholesale annual revenue achieved a record high of $11.5 billion, which has been buttressed by record labels’ commitment to using technological innovation to (in their words) “deepen the connection between artists and fans.” The latter comment applies mainly to streaming, as the U.S. remains the world’s largest paid subscription market with 106.5 million accounts generating $6.4 billion in revenue. (Premium paid subscription revenues grew by 6.8% to $5.88 billion.)

That all said, now that I’ve just calculated how much I personally added to that 2025 U.S. vinyl sales figure (and to our GDP, for that matter) due to all the LPs I bought in 2025 — a trend that’s clearly going to increase here in 2026, based on the vinyl purchases I’ve already made in Q1 — I think it’s high time to put on some of that new wax and celebrate this news! How about you? Happy spinning, everyone. . .

For more on the RIAA, go here.