The CD is up fifty-nine per cent
American recorded music grew 6.9% in the first half. The fastest-growing format was the one the industry spent twenty years writing off.
SEPTEMBER 20, 2026
TopicMusic
One hundred and fifty thousand a day
Uploads to streaming services have reached a rate no audience can absorb. A fifth of everything already there was streamed exactly zero times last year.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2026
The growth is somewhere else
Global recorded music grew again, and the fastest-growing markets are ones the industry's infrastructure was not built around.
SEPTEMBER 7, 2026
The festival middle disappears
The largest events are more profitable than ever. Independent festivals are closing at a rate that has removed a fifth of them in three years.
SEPTEMBER 7, 2026
Vinyl is a real business again
Physical formats were supposed to be a nostalgia trade winding down. They are the fastest-growing line in recorded music.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2026
Half the uploads are machines
Generated tracks now arrive faster than human ones. The platforms' problem is not taste, it is that a share of the plays are fraudulent.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2026
The superfan is the business model
A small fraction of listeners generates most of the money an artist actually receives, and the industry has finally started building for them.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2026
Sync is the growth line
Streaming is the volume business and it grows slowly. Licensing a song to a screen is the smaller number that is moving.
SEPTEMBER 5, 2026
Streaming learns to weight a play
For fifteen years every stream paid the same. The platforms are now deciding that some plays should count for more, and the arguments are about who loses.
SEPTEMBER 4, 2026
All-In pricing comes to tickets
The fee was never the problem. Revealing it on the last screen was, and federal rules now require the number to appear first.
SEPTEMBER 4, 2026
Catalogs are a rates trade
A song's cash flows did not change when the discount rate did. What a buyer will pay for them changed a great deal.
AUGUST 19, 2026
The rooms that build careers
Stadium touring has never earned more. The clubs where headliners learn to hold a room are the part of the business that is failing.
AUGUST 18, 2026
Why Sticky Fingers still matters
Half a century on, the Rolling Stones' 1971 album remains the template for how a band turns danger into durability.
AUGUST 14, 2026
Old songs are winning streaming, and it's not nostalgia alone
Catalog music dominates listening because the platforms, the playlists, and the economics all bend toward the proven.
JULY 20, 2026
The farewell tour that never ends is a business model
Legacy acts have turned goodbye into a franchise, and the audiences keep coming because the songs are the point.
JUNE 25, 2026
How Rumours keeps finding new generations
Fleetwood Mac's 1977 masterpiece has been rediscovered by every platform era, and its resilience explains how catalog culture works now.
JUNE 2, 2026