Luminate’s 2025 Year-End Music Report is chock-full of useful data for those looking to learn more about the state of the music business and its consumer trends. Among the notable metrics from last year was that Total U.S. Album Consumption (album sales plus track-equivalent albums plus stream-equivalent albums) grew 4.8% year over year in 2025, slightly outpacing total U.S. On-Demand Audio streams (+4.6% YoY).
Interestingly, that boost in album consumption seems to have been fueled by physical album sales, which grew a healthy 6.5%, to 16.2 million units — the biggest YoY percentage of all the key U.S. metrics. The most natural explanation for that growth is Taylor Swift, whose latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, and its many physical variants sold incredibly well.
But digging deeper into the data shows other key players helped push physical music to a strong late-year finish, which in turn directly impacted overall industry consumption growth.
Vinyl is typically the focus when discussing physical music sales, but Luminate data shows the CD shouldn’t be counted out just yet. While vinyl was the most purchased physical music format in 2025 — 47.8 million vinyl records sold versus 33.8 million CDs — quarterly data points to CD sales gaining notable momentum in the latter half of the year.
Specifically, total U.S. CD sales reached 8.3 million units in Q3 2025 (+12.3% quarter over quarter) and 11.4 million in Q4 (+15.8%). Its Q4 growth even edged out vinyl’s trajectory for that quarter, which saw a 13.1% increase in sales compared with Q4 2024.
Swift’s Life of a Showgirl, released in October, obviously played a large part in this late-year surge. But it was far from the only major hit around that time: Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album, Man’s Best Friend, dropped in late August and became the fifth-highest-selling physical album for the year, while the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack took everyone by surprise in its July release and also ended the year in the top 10.
But another major driver was K-pop powerhouse Stray Kids, whose album Karma in August became the second highest-selling physical album of 2025 in the U.S., at 585,000 units — with 524,000 of those just from CDs, which may help explain the format’s late-year surge.
Additionally, the group’s November mixtape, DO IT, was only physically released as a limited-edition CD and became the third-highest-selling CD (456,000 units) behind Karma and Showgirl.
Alongside Stray Kids, K-pop groups ENHYPEN, ATEEZ and TOMORROW X TOGETHER put out seven of the top 10 U.S. CD albums in 2025 (all of those releases in the second half of 2025 as well). In fact, if you remove K-pop from the list, the resulting top 10 would total around 1 million units fewer than the actual total of 4.3 million.
Still, K-pop leading the charge for CD sales isn’t too surprising. It’s more commonplace for artists of that genre to release EPs, or “mini-albums,” in between full-length albums at a faster pace than a typical Western pop artist.
CD drops by these groups tend to come in numerous variations and with exclusive merch. The one for ENHYPEN’s mini-album DESIRE: UNLEASH came in seven unique versions based on each member at the time (Heeseung left the group in March 2026), featuring unique album art, photo books and collectibles, thus prompting fans to buy multiple copies.
In other words, CDs packaged with perks and superfans eager to engage with artists are cornerstones of K-pop. Luminate’s U.S. Music 360 survey found 27% of U.S. K-pop fans reported buying a CD in 2025 (vs. 19% of general music listeners). Nearly a quarter of that group said they’d bought five to nine CDs in the past 12 months, compared with 15% of music listeners.
The K-pop industry’s release strategies ultimately inspired non-K-pop artists to use similar tactics — Swift’s Showgirl has a whopping 27 physical editions to date. But regardless of artists and release tactics, the fact remains that physical sales, and by extension superfandom, played a major role in growing U.S. music consumption last year and will likely continue to do so in 2026.
Connect with Luminate Insights to dive deeper into fan behaviors and the myriad trends between artists and genres.
