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

For decades, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has performed several important tasks, including advocating on behalf of the recorded music industry on Capitol Hill and protecting labels’ interests in court cases and legal issues across the country.

Its other vital task: reporting U.S. industry revenues twice a year — closely-watched metrics that indicate the health of the recorded music business in the United States. For years, the RIAA has kept a database on its website reaching back to the 1970s, which tracked revenues at retail value for the overall business, as well as broken out by format — vinyl, CD, cassette and digital download sales, as well as revenues from streaming, both paid and ad-supported, among a handful of other metrics. Those numbers, to many, are known by heart: At the industry’s high-water mark in 1999 — the height of the CD boom — revenues reached $14.6 billion, before digital piracy took the industry out at its knees. And at its nadir in 2014, the industry last saw a year-over-year decline, to $6.7 billion, before streaming finally began to pull it back to growth.

Those well-known figures for the overall business were reported at retail values, and they were the ones trumpeted by the RIAA and used as shorthand for the health, or stagnation, of the business for decades. At the end of each of its reports, at both midyear and year-end, the RIAA would then break out retail revenue figures for each of those underlying metrics, allowing for year-over-year analysis of trends and consumer habits. For many years, the RIAA would also include one other figure, often presented as an afterthought — overall industry revenues at wholesale values, or the figures that the labels themselves were receiving, rather than what consumers were paying. That number was never broken down by individual format and was often merely one sentence in a longer report.

At the midyear mark of 2025, however, the RIAA has decided to dispense with retail valuations entirely, presenting each of its metrics in wholesale values only. The figures are generally smaller than retail revenues — which reflect markup prices that consumers pay — and the RIAA says this change puts it more in line with other industry metrics, such as the IFPI’s global music report, which reports revenues from recorded music around the globe. 

For the first half of 2025, at wholesale values, the U.S. recorded music business reached $5.6 billion in revenue across all formats, up 0.9% year-over-year from the midpoint of 2024, with streaming revenues accounting for $4.68 billion, or 84% of the total. Within that, paid subscription revenue accounted for $3.2 billion, up 5.7% year-over-year and once again accounting for the biggest chunk of revenue for the U.S. business, which it has since 2015’s tipping point.

The problem is, this change — which the RIAA had not previously announced — alters perceptions of the industry’s growth that the organization itself had cultivated over decades of reporting at retail values. Further still, since individual sales and streaming metrics had never been broken out at wholesale values — and are now no longer broken out at retail — year-over-year comparisons on vinyl sales, CD sales, downloads, paid streaming revenues and other metrics are no longer possible beyond what the RIAA reported for last year, meaning that any historical data comparisons — such as multiyear trend lines, for example — can no longer be made. (The data is available by country only within the IFPI’s annual premium reports, which cost north of $20,000.)

The RIAA’s digital database, which had contained those revenue figures by format going back to 1974, also no longer exists on its website. A rep for the organization told Billboard that it is in the process of updating that database with wholesale numbers, and that it will be available again when the RIAA releases its full-year figures for 2025, which is generally in the spring of the following year.

So, with that data no longer available and the metrics that many in the industry have often relied on now moot, according to RIAA, Billboard has compiled two charts to compare retail vs. wholesale growth over the past decade. To do so, we’ve used RIAA reports year-over-year (with updated metrics where available; RIAA will often revise prior year numbers on future reports), both at the midyear mark and the year-end mark. While no data exists to assess trends by format historically at wholesale, these graphs will at least help to conceptualize the change from retail to wholesale on an overall level, until or unless the RIAA provides more detailed data.