This week, the RIAA released its annual mid-year report on the state of the U.S. recorded music industry, which showed (among many other data points) that in the first half of 2026, revenue from physical music — largely vinyl and CD sales — was up 25.9% over the first half of 2025. That kind of massive growth — in an era where streaming revenue alone makes up 82% of the business — is staggering, and comes with a 20-year growth pattern for vinyl (up 17.7% year over year) and an eye-popping 58.6% year over year bump for CD sales, largely driven by the K-pop industry and a general trend toward viewing physical media as a merch item.
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And underpinning a significant amount of that growth is Alliance Entertainment, the biggest indie distributor and wholesaler for physical music in the country. Alliance is both a one-stop shop for consumers and independent record stores to purchase vinyl and CDs and a distributor through its AMPED division, which partners with labels across the country to fulfill their vinyl and CD needs for releases by their artists. And the company is thriving in this new environment: according to CEO Jeff Walker, Alliance’s sales are up 46% year over year, as the vinyl boom continues and CD sales balloon. And that helps Walker earn the title of Billboard’s Executive of the Week.
Here, Walker discusses the physical media boom, why CD sales in particular have grown and why, in such a digital world, physical still has its place. “Fans do not have to buy any physical product to listen to music today, with all of the digital options,” Walker says. “Fans are buying physical because they are true fans of the artists and want to own a piece of what they have created. Vinyl and CDs are collectibles just like trading cards and anything else people collect — that is why people say, ‘I have a vinyl collection,’ or a CD collection. It has always been a collectible.”
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This week, the RIAA published its 2026 mid-year report, showing that vinyl sales in the U.S. were up another 17.7% year over year, at $544 million, well on its way to its second straight $1 billion year (the first since 1983) and its 20th straight year of growth. As the largest vinyl distributor in the U.S., how has Alliance been able to help fuel this growth?
In 2025, we sold 16.8 million units of vinyl and 13.5 million units of CD, and we are on track for 2026 to sell 20 million units of both vinyl and CD. Crazy increases. We do this two ways: as a traditional one-stop, stocking and selling all music titles from the major labels and independent distributors; and through our AMPED Distribution division that has become the largest independent distribution company in the United States. Fiscal year 2026 sales of AMPED are at $114 million, up 46% from fiscal year 2025.
On the one-stop side, we are stocking in excess of $25 million of vinyl inventory and $10 million of CD inventory today that supports all sales channels including our [consumer direct] fulfillment. For the AMPED-represented labels, the inventory is on consignment at Alliance and with coverage to all independent stores, chain stores and websites worldwide, we can provide the highest fill percentages and sales to our label partners and retailers.
What do you feel is largely behind the two-decade growth in vinyl after it had been overtaken first by CDs, then by digital music?
There are several factors, but first and foremost is the creation of Record Store Day 19 years ago, making a single day all about physical music. Similar to the creation of Black Friday. The evolution of RSD over the last 19 years has been incredible. Alliance is a huge part of RSD, delivering over 700,000 units of vinyl to independent music stores last April.
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The RIAA report also showed that CD sales were up 58.6% year over year in the first half of 2026. Why do you think that’s the case, and how do you see CD growth continuing or not in the future?
The CD growth has been insane the last couple years, and that got a lot of support from the growth of K-pop on CD and recently the social media hype of owning a physical copy of your favorite music, and fans building collections of their favorite artists. This is not going to stop, it is just ramping up now.
What are some of the challenges in the physical distribution world now, and how do you work to mitigate them?
To me we don’t have challenges, as sales are on fire in physical music. We operated for years with declining sales and that was very challenging. We just focus on accurate forecasting to provide the best possible in-stock fill rates for our customers to support their business.
Over the last few years, dozens of new companies have jumped into the digital distribution space. Despite the growth in physical media, that hasn’t been the case on the physical distribution side. Why do you think that is, and what opportunities does that create for Alliance?
Physical distribution is difficult and in music we are managing over 200,000 music [stock keeping units] with over 50,000 of them in vinyl. We have an exceptional sales team at Alliance that is focused on helping our customers be successful. We are continuing to see many opportunities to grow Alliance.
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How are you working to help Alliance continue to grow and evolve to meet the changing market moving forward?
We are hyper-focused on providing improved service and technology to support our customers. In January 2026 we implemented Hubspot as our [customer relationship manager] to assist our sales team to be more efficient for customers and to enhance our marketing effort. Finding ways to help the retail store buyer know about new product and buy more efficiently. We are currently deep into an AI project to completely rebuild and improve our Webami B2B website that will provide many new tools for our customers to help their buying accuracy and help them identify titles they might be missing. That is launching in Q1 2027.