Nearfield acoustic holography (NAH) is a powerful tool for realizing sources identification and sound field reconstruction. The wave superposition (WS) based NAH is appropriate for the spatially extended sources and does not require the complex numerical integrals. Equivalent source method (ESM), as a classical WS approach, is widely used for its simplicity and efficiency. In ESM, a virtual source surface is introduced, on which the virtual point sources are taken as the assumed sources, and an optimal retreat distance needs to be considered. A newly proposed WS-based approach, the element radiation superposition method (ERSM), uses piston surface sources as the assumed sources without the need to choose a virtual source surface. To satisfy the use conditions of the pressure formula of pistons, the sizes of pistons are set to be as small as possible, which results in large numbers of pistons and sampling points. In this paper, transfer matrix modes (TMMs), which are composed of the singular vectors of the vibro-acoustic transfer matrix, are used as the sparse basis of piston normal velocities. Then, the compressive ERSM based on TMMs is proposed. Compared to the conventional ERSM, the proposed method maintains a good pressure reconstruction when the numbers of sampling points and pistons are both reduced. Besides, the proposed method is compared with the compressive ESM in a mathematical sense. Both simulations and experiments for a rectangular plate demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over the existing methods.