American vinyl sales topped $1.04 billion in 2025, according to the RIAA’s year-end revenue report — the format’s best year since 1983. Records have grown for 19 straight years running, and last year alone Americans bought 46.8 million of them, up nearly 8% from 2024.

Key Points

• Vinyl revenue hit $1,042.9 million in 2025, up 9.3% from $954.4 million in 2024.
• Americans bought 46.8 million vinyl records, up 7.9% from 43.4 million the year before.
• It’s the 19th consecutive year of vinyl revenue growth in the US.
• The last time vinyl cleared $1 billion in a single year was 1983.
• The US generates nearly half of all global vinyl revenue.
• CDs moved the opposite direction, falling 7.8% in revenue and 11.6% in units.

Zoom out and the number gets bigger. Total US recorded music revenue reached $11.5 billion in 2025, and vinyl still makes up less than a tenth of that — streaming alone pulled in $9.47 billion, nearly seven times what every physical format combined brought in. But among the physical formats, vinyl is doing almost all the heavy lifting: it accounted for $1.04 billion of a $1.38 billion physical total, easily outpacing CDs’ $312.4 million and the smaller “other physical” category’s $25.8 million.

That CD number is the real tell. Compact discs have been sliding for two decades, and 2025 was no different — revenue down almost 8%, units down more than 11%. Vinyl went the opposite way in the same twelve months, in the same shrinking physical market, which is what makes the 19-year growth streak notable rather than incidental.

One artist explains a meaningful chunk of the surge. Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl sold roughly 1.6 million vinyl copies in 2025 — more than five times the runner-up, Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend, which moved about 292,000 copies, according to Axios’s review of the RIAA figures. A single release moving that much wax says something about how vinyl buying has shifted from a niche collector habit toward a mainstream album-release ritual.

The bigger pattern predates any one artist, though. Forbes’s own review of a decade of RIAA data shows vinyl revenue climbing in nearly every year since the mid-2000s, from roughly $225 million a decade ago to today’s $1 billion-plus — a run that survived the entire streaming era, not just one pop star’s release calendar. That’s not a nostalgia blip. It’s two decades of a format the industry had all but buried building itself back into a real business, one turntable at a time.