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Friday, December 02, 2022
Nothing beats the convenience of having decades' worth of music at your disposal at any time, any place, all at a monthly fee equivalent to the price of a single album. Considering this, the unstoppable rise of Spotify and other streaming services doesn’t come as surprise. What is a bit surprising is the pace at which people abandoned physical music.
The first chart shows that having been hit by the rise of filesharing and MP3 players in the early 2000s, CD sales nearly halved between 2000 and 2007, which is when smartphones and the first music streaming services emerged.
The second chart indicates that under proper storage and normal use vinyl has the longest life expectancy out of various forms of storage media. The compact disc (CD) comes in second with cassette tapes estimated to have the shortest life expectancy.
According to data from Statista’s Global Consumer Survey, less than three in ten respondents across several major markets said they listen to music from physical formats at all. China has the lowest amount of people who listen to music physically, and Germany has the highest.
Source: (a), Statista (b), Statista (c), Statista