Record: US Recorded Music Revenue Hit $15B in 2021

Recorded-music revenues in the United States reached $15 billion at retail in 2021, according to the RIAA’s annual year-end report.

Billboard reports that towering figure, in a vacuum, exceeds the record-high water mark of 1999, when revenues reached $14.6 billion at the height of the CD boom, though the optimism comes with a major caveat — inflation over the past 20-plus years has grown to the point that the $15 billion actually represents a figure 37% lower than the high-water mark, which would be around $24 billion in today’s dollars.

In Billions

Still, the figures are another welcome sign for a business that had bottomed out less than a decade ago. In 2021, revenues were up 23% overall over the $12.1 billion clocked in 2020, as streaming revenues alone surpassed that 2020 mark, having climbed 24% in the past year to account for $12.4 billion in 2021, or 83% of all recorded music revenues. That’s being driven by a 23% growth in paid subscription streaming revenue, which now accounts for $9.5 billion of that figure, or 76% of streaming revenues (including $907 million from limited-tier subscriptions, up 26% itself).

For the year, the average number of paid subscribers in the U.S. reached 84 million, up 11% from last year’s 75.5 million and 60.4 million in 2019. Meanwhile, ad-supported on-demand streaming revenue rebounded to 47% growth in 2021, reaching $1.8 billion, and SoundExchange and other digital radio distributions totaled $1.2 billion, with the SoundExchange piece up 5% year over year from $993 million in 2020.

On the sales side, digital downloads continued to decline, down 12% to $587 million in 2021 — of that figure, digital album sales accounted for $282 million (down 12%) and digital track sales sunk to $256 million (down 16%). In total, digital sales was just 4% of total revenues for the year, according to the RIAA’s figures.

On the other hand, physical sales were up across the board — the first time since 1996 that both CD sales revenue and vinyl album sales revenue grew in the same year. Overall, physical sales reached $1.66 billion, a 42.3% increase over 2020’s $1.16 billion, with big numbers on each side.

Vinyl, which has been growing for 15 solid years now, reached the $1 billion revenue threshold for the first time since 1986, according to the RIAA, up 61% year over year and accounting for just over $1 billion in revenues and a whopping 7% of overall recorded music revenues, as well as 63% of physical revenues. CDs, meanwhile, saw the first year over year jump since the digital revolution started to sink CD sales in 2004, growing 21% to $584 million, just shy of the total digital download revenue.

“The incredible run of strong, industry-wide growth documented in this and prior reports speaks to the dynamic and vibrant creative and commercial relationships today’s labels have built with their artist partners,” RIAA chairman/CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement accompanying the report.