As iPhone killed iPod, so too did iPod kill the CD. Though as Miracle Max might say, it turns out CDs are only mostly dead. According to a piece from MarketWatch, “CD sales increased in 2021 for the first time in 17 years.” It was not a big increase. “According to a yearly report from music data compiler MRC Data," says the piece:
…sales of CDs increased from 40.16 million units in 2020 to 40.59 million in 2021, marking the first time CD sales have increased on a year-over-year basis since 2004.
Vinyl sales were also up, but that’s been happening for a while. As for the rise in CDs, the report attributes most of that to three female artists in particular. MarketWatch says, “Adele, Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo all moved heavy volumes of physical CDs in 2021 as each artist released albums last year.”
Fun and anachronistic as the physical sales seem, it is still a streaming world. The MRC report says, “Audio on-demand streaming reached a new single-year high of 988.1 billion streams in 2021 (up 12.6% from 877.2 billion in 2020)…”
