Ah, 1983, I remember it well. I was selling 45 rpm, 7-inch singles for CBS Records (Michael Jackson’s Thriller had just been released) and the folks from headquarters brought in a new fangled thing called a Compact Disc, with a just-off-the-boat Japanese Sony CD player with a voltage converter. I think the CD they played was Billy Joel’s The Stranger, as the Nippon Columbia plant was making the CDs well ahead of their manufacture in the States. I knew my days selling vinyl were limited and I left the business and started a masters degree in digital media at the end of 1984. These days, the two biggest media plays in my household are #1) legal downloads, #2) rips from CDs, and #3) vinyl records. Looks like #2 is going away fast.
Cambridge, MA (February 21, 2008)–A new forecast by Forrester Research, Inc. paints a gloomy picture for the recorded music industry. Cheerfully entitled “The End Of The Music Industry As We Know It,” the report predicts that digital music sales will skyrocket over the next few years, yet will still not offset plunging CD sales.
Half of all music sold in the US will be digital in 2011 and sales of digitally downloaded music will surpass physical CD sales in 2012, according to the new report. Digital music sales will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent over the next five years, reaching $4.8 billion in revenue by 2012, but will fail to make up for the continuing steady decline in CD sales. In 2012, CD sales will be reduced to just $3.8 billion.
Read the entire press release here