Japan's record market: streaming hits 46% while vinyl jumps 42%

Japan, the world's second-largest recorded music market, is moving towards streaming, but slowly and on its own terms. On 31 Aug 2026 the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) estimated that the country's record sales for January to June 2026 came to ¥196.5 billion, 104% of the same period a year earlier. Streaming took ¥90.9 billion of that, or 46% of the whole market. CDs still brought in ¥72.0 billion, and vinyl grew 42%.

The figures are in Japanese; the translations and arithmetic below are ours.

What did RIAJ actually report?

The release splits the market into "music software" (physical) and "music distribution" (digital). The half-year figures, with each compared with the year before:

• Streaming, subscription: ¥79.07 billion (119%)
• Streaming, ad-supported: ¥11.78 billion (120%)
• Downloads: ¥5.88 billion (95%)
• Digital total: ¥97.0 billion (117%)
• CD (singles and albums): ¥72.02 billion (89%)
• Analog discs (vinyl): ¥5.36 billion (142%)
• Music video (DVD, Blu-ray): ¥21.76 billion (99%)
• Physical total: ¥99.5 billion (93%)

We checked the headline share against the line items. Subscription plus ad-supported streaming comes to ¥90.85 billion, which RIAJ rounds to ¥90.9 billion, and that divided by the ¥196.5 billion total is 46.2%. The 46% holds.

One detail the headline skips: physical formats together (¥99.5 billion) still took slightly more than digital (¥97.0 billion). For contrast, IFPI's Global Music Report 2026 says subscription streaming alone accounted for more than 50% of recorded music revenues worldwide in 2025.

These are estimates, not counts. RIAJ adds a modelled figure for non-member companies to its members' reported sales, using market-share data from NIQ/GfK Japan and SoundScan Japan, according to its data page. The series is also new: RIAJ says it began publishing it with calendar 2025 as the first edition and will update it quarterly, so there is no long run of comparable half-years yet.

Is streaming taking over?

It is gaining ground fast. In RIAJ's first full-year estimate, for 2025, physical formats made up 57% of a ¥398.8 billion market and digital 43%, according to BCN. Six months into 2026, physical is down to about 51%.

That comparison needs care. A half-year is not a full year, and big CD releases bunch around particular months, so the second half could pull physical's share back up. But both streaming lines grew by about a fifth while CDs fell by about a tenth, and that gap is the trend to watch.

How big is the vinyl boom in yen?

Smaller than the percentage suggests. Vinyl's ¥5.36 billion is about 2.7% of the market. Working back from RIAJ's rounded percentages, vinyl added roughly ¥1.6 billion on the year, while CDs lost roughly ¥8.9 billion. Vinyl made up less than a fifth of what the CD lost. The growth is real, and it is a good sign for artists who press records, but in Japan it is a growing niche next to a shrinking giant, not a replacement for it.

Why does Japan still buy CDs?

Partly structure. Japan's Fair Trade Commission has allowed a resale price maintenance system for copyrighted works, which lets record companies fix retail prices for CDs, records and music tapes, to stay "for the time being". Record companies report to the commission each year on how they relax it. In practice music CDs have carried a time-limited fixed price since the 1990s, originally two years from release. By the end of 2025, 90% or more of RIAJ's member labels ran foreign singles and albums on a period of six months or none at all, as did about 85% for Japanese albums and about 90% for Japanese singles.

Partly fandom, and the bundles that serve it. The same report counts 9,524 new CD-type releases in 2025, 1,208 of them CD plus DVD or Blu-ray sets. RIAJ says those sets are outside the price system and are widely discounted from release. Of the six titles certified for a million net shipments in 2025, five came out in that CD-plus-video form, and Snow Man alone had three. IFPI's report calls Japan the world's largest physical market and says its return to growth drove the global rebound in physical revenues in 2025, alongside other markets, noting that physical products give superfans "a tangible means of expressing their fandom".

What we think

The 46% headline is accurate, and it is the right story for Japan's major labels: the world's largest physical market is now close to half-streamed. For international independent artists, the more useful number is the other half.

The CD isn't dead in Japan, so don't plan as if it were. At ¥72 billion in six months, the CD is still the biggest physical format, second only to subscription streaming (¥79 billion). Indies who ship only vinyl and streams to Japan are skipping the format with the most physical money in it. A modest CD run through a Japanese partner, ideally with something local to it, is a sensible bet there. That is our reading of the numbers, not a sales guarantee.

Vinyl is a margin play, not a volume play. Forty-two percent growth on a small base is worth having, especially for genres with collector audiences. But at under 3% of the market, a Japan plan built mainly on vinyl is a plan for a niche.

Streaming is where the growth is, and it pays on different terms. With subscription streaming up 19% in a half-year, Japan is becoming a market where being findable in Japanese streaming catalogues, with correct metadata and localised artist names, matters more every quarter.

In Japan the package is the product. Five of 2025's six million-sellers were CD-plus-video sets. Indies can't match million-seller fandom, but the lesson scales down: a disc with something you can't stream (a live set, a booklet in Japanese, a bonus track) gives a Japanese fan a reason to buy the object rather than just press play.

Japan's split market is not an anomaly that streaming will tidy away in a year. For artists who sell physical products, it is the clearest evidence anywhere that fans will still pay for an object when the object means something.