Back when I was living in Portland, a friend introduced me to Sonos. I was all in. All that music at my fingertips, following me from room to room. Suddenly the crates of CDs I’d collected over the years running radio stations looked obsolete.
So I hauled them over to Powell’s Books and sold a ton of them. I kept some. But thousands of discs, going all the way back to my college radio days at WRAS in Atlanta, went right back out into the ecosystem.
I regret it now. Not as a financial decision. Those CDs were the history of what I’d done in radio, and I traded it for the convenience of a streaming app.
Turns out the music business is having some second thoughts of its own.
Streaming Has Stopped Growing
For about a decade, the industry had one easy answer to every hard question. Revenue down? Wait for streaming. Artists underpaid? Relax, the pie is growing.
That answer is running out of road. According to new data from DMN Pro, the total number of paid US streaming subscribers actually declined in Q2 2026. Year over year, the number is up only in the low single digits. DMN Pro calls it a “now-mature” market.
Most of the chatter will be about the horse race. Apple Music briefly passed Spotify in Q1, then handed the lead back. By June, Spotify had roughly 55.5 million US subscribers to Apple’s 49.7 million. But both lost ground in the quarter. When the two biggest players shrink at the same time, that’s not a competition story. That’s a market story.
Bundles and Discounts Didn’t Buy Fans
DMN Pro suggests Apple’s early surge came largely from trial and bundled users who signed up for TV+ or iCloud and found Apple Music along for the ride. When the promos ran out, many walked.
Price didn’t hold them either. Apple was $1 to $2 a month cheaper than Spotify for over a year. Playlists, a familiar interface and years of listening history mattered more. You can bundle someone into a subscription. You can’t bundle them into being a fan.
That stickiness means streamers can raise prices, and Apple already bumped its Individual plan to $11.99 in July. But growth from price instead of people just means squeezing the same customers harder.
Meanwhile, Fans Are Buying CDs Again
Here’s the twist. While subscriber counts stalled, fans went back to the record store. According to the RIAA’s 2026 mid-year report, CD revenue jumped 58.6% in the first half to $171.1 million, with units up 45.7% to 17.5 million. Vinyl climbed 17.7% to $543.8 million.
K-pop deluxe editions did a lot of the lifting. But Luminate found CD sales still grew 6.7% without K-pop, and roughly half of Gen Z and millennial CD buyers don’t even own a CD player. They’re not buying a format. They’re buying a piece of the artist. As Hypebot put it: “Embrace the compact disc. It’s officially cool again.”
What It Means
The growth is now coming from fans, not new subscribers. Overall US recorded music revenue still rose 6.9% to about $6 billion in the first half, powered by higher prices and physical sales. Spotify is loading its app with audiobooks, podcasts and video to keep the customers it has. YouTube Music climbed past 14 million subscribers while Amazon Music slid to 31.1 million.
For artists and labels, the “rising tide” argument is fading. Expect more superfan tiers, more deluxe physical releases and more fights over how payouts are calculated. And anyone who paid top dollar for catalogs on projections of endless subscriber growth may want to rerun the math.
None of this means streaming is in trouble. It’s the business now. But the easy money phase is over. The winners will be the ones who turn casual listeners into real fans, the kind who want something to hold.
As for me, I’d love to have those crates back. Somewhere out there, someone is flipping through my old CDs from Powell’s. I hope they know what they’ve got.
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