RIAA Switches Key Revenue Metrics From Retail to Wholesale: What to Know

For decades, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has performed respective important tasks, including advocating connected behalf of the recorded euphony manufacture connected Capitol Hill and protecting labels’ interests successful tribunal cases and ineligible issues crossed the country.

Its different captious task: reporting U.S. manufacture revenues doubly a twelvemonth — closely-watched metrics that bespeak the wellness of the recorded euphony concern successful the United States. For years, the RIAA has kept a database connected its website reaching backmost to the 1970s, which tracked revenues astatine retail worth for the wide business, arsenic good arsenic breached retired by format — vinyl, CD, cassette and integer download sales, arsenic good arsenic revenues from streaming, some paid and ad-supported, among a fistful of different metrics. Those numbers, to many, are known by heart: At the industry’s high-water people successful 1999 — the tallness of the CD roar — revenues reached $14.6 billion, earlier integer piracy took the manufacture retired astatine its knees. And astatine its nadir successful 2014, the manufacture past saw a year-over-year decline, to $6.7 billion, earlier streaming yet began to propulsion it backmost to growth.

Those well-known figures for the wide concern were reported astatine retail values, and they were the ones trumpeted by the RIAA and utilized arsenic shorthand for the health, oregon stagnation, of the concern for decades. At the extremity of each of its reports, astatine some midyear and year-end, the RIAA would past interruption retired retail gross figures for each of those underlying metrics, allowing for year-over-year investigation of trends and user habits. For galore years, the RIAA would besides see 1 different figure, often presented arsenic an afterthought — wide manufacture revenues astatine wholesale values, oregon the figures that the labels themselves were receiving, rather than what consumers were paying. That fig was ne'er breached down by idiosyncratic format and was often simply 1 condemnation successful a longer report.

At the midyear people of 2025, however, the RIAA has decided to dispense with retail valuations entirely, presenting each of its metrics successful wholesale values only. The figures are mostly smaller than retail revenues — which bespeak markup prices that consumers wage — and the RIAA says this alteration puts it much successful enactment with different manufacture metrics, specified arsenic the IFPI’s planetary euphony report, which reports revenues from recorded euphony astir the globe. 

For the first fractional of 2025, astatine wholesale values, the U.S. recorded euphony concern reached $5.6 cardinal successful gross crossed each formats, up 0.9% year-over-year from the midpoint of 2024, with streaming revenues accounting for $4.68 billion, oregon 84% of the total. Within that, paid subscription gross accounted for $3.2 billion, up 5.7% year-over-year and erstwhile again accounting for the biggest chunk of gross for the U.S. business, which it has since 2015’s tipping point.

The occupation is, this alteration — which the RIAA had not antecedently announced — alters perceptions of the industry’s maturation that the enactment itself had cultivated implicit decades of reporting astatine retail values. Further still, since idiosyncratic income and streaming metrics had ne'er been breached retired astatine wholesale values — and are present nary longer breached retired astatine retail — year-over-year comparisons connected vinyl sales, CD sales, downloads, paid streaming revenues and different metrics are nary longer imaginable beyond what the RIAA reported for past year, meaning that immoderate humanities information comparisons — specified arsenic multiyear inclination lines, for illustration — tin nary longer beryllium made. (The information is disposable by state lone wrong the IFPI’s yearly premium reports, which outgo northbound of $20,000.)

The RIAA’s integer database, which had contained those gross figures by format going backmost to 1974, besides nary longer exists connected its website. A rep for the enactment told Billboard that it is successful the process of updating that database with wholesale numbers, and that it volition beryllium disposable again erstwhile the RIAA releases its full-year figures for 2025, which is mostly successful the outpouring of the pursuing year.

So, with that information nary longer disposable and the metrics that galore successful the manufacture person often relied connected present moot, according to RIAA, Billboard has compiled 2 charts to comparison retail vs. wholesale maturation implicit the past decade. To bash so, we’ve utilized RIAA reports year-over-year (with updated metrics wherever available; RIAA volition often revise anterior twelvemonth numbers connected aboriginal reports), some astatine the midyear people and the year-end mark. While nary information exists to measure trends by format historically astatine wholesale, these graphs volition astatine slightest assistance to conceptualize the alteration from retail to wholesale connected an wide level, until ...