02 August 2009 — 10 Years After Peak Music
According to this piece in The New York Times (via Daringfireball), "since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of those sales, after adjusting for inflation, has dropped by more than half". Which I guess is interesting, but is anyone that surprised? Two things in this article surprised me more:
The peak of music sales in terms of value was in 1999. That seems so late to me, now that it feels like we've been in the current climate forever. I guess it was around that time when I first started to download music myself, using up inordinate amounts of space on my computer's hard drive.
If you examine the accompanying infographic, you'll see what peak value was for vinyl, in adjusted dollars: $8.1 billion, in 1978. Which is less that half the $16.4 billion that CDs reached at their peak. No wonder everyone in the music industry was doing so much cocaine in the 80s.
I'm not really sure what this whole "death of the music industry" line is supposed to be about. There will always be a music industry, because people are always going to play music, and some of them are going to find ways of making money from it. It's like talking about the death of the food industry. Of course things are changing, and a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money before things settle to a new equilibrium, but that's going to happen in a lot of areas over the next few decades.