The Real Death of the Music Industry

I linked to this chart on music industry sales last week, and a bunch of DF readers emailed to point out that because the revenue numbers weren’t inflation-adjusted, the chart was pretty much worthless as a historical overview of the industry. There were other problems with that chart, too — e.g. the data was U.S.-only, not worldwide.

Michael DeGusta did the work of generating an inflation-adjusted (as well as population-adjusted) chart of music sales worldwide. And it does look like the industry is shrinking. Why? Because album sales are plummeting, and single sales — though rising — aren’t enough to compensate for the drop in album sales.

★ Tuesday, 22 February 2011