CD Sales Are On The Rise Making Them Officially Cool Again

And it’s all thanks to Adele, T Swift and BTS, of course.

Do you remember the first CD you ever bought?

The ol’ compact disc took a bit of a hiatus in the mid-2000s with the introduction of online music streaming, but now they’re clawing their way back!

According to MRC Data, who collect music stats for Billboard, more than 40.59 million CDs were sold in the US last year – up 1.1 per cent on 2020 and the first increase in sales since the iPod Mini was released!

The jump is thanks to the chart-topping albums from Adele, Taylor Swift and BTS. Adele’s 30 was the US’s highest-selling CD with close to 900,000 copies sold in 2021.

Swifty fans will rejoice in the news that Taylor claimed the second, third and fourth slots with the re-recorded Fearless (263,000 copies) and Red (237,000 copies), as well as evermore (213,000 copies).

Meanwhile, South Korean boy band, BTS, sold 210,000 copies of Map of the Soul: 7 and 187,000 copies of Be.

Olivia Rodrigo also landed herself in the top ten best-selling CDs of 2021 with almost 200,000 copies of her debut album, Sour. And if you need a reminder of that album's goodness, you bet we ranked every song here.

But that isn’t all – turns out 2021 was just the year of vintage music formats making a resurgence!

The number of people getting their music fix via vinyl records grew by more than half, and, for the first time since ’08, the audio streaming of current music actually declined. Listeners were instead reconnecting with or discovering old favourites (thanks TikTok).

Anyway, now that you've had your daily dose of nostalgia, it's time to search the house for any device that might still play a CD!

Header image: cottonbro via Pexels.