The Decline of the Music Industry

Here are two charts that show the decline of the music industry over time. The chart on the left, from the New York Times shows billions of dollars in sale by year, by media type.  You can see that cassettes peaked in 1988 at $6.1 billion that year.  Likewise, the huge bump toward the bottom is CD's which peaked in 1999 at $16.4 billion that year.  After that... it's all small stuff in terms of music sales.

The chart below, from Business Insider, shows the rise and fall of music sales in a cumulative manner. Again, the yellow band shows that CDs were the behemoth of the music industry from the mid 80s until recently.

The red band at the right shows digital music sales.  As you can see total music sales are dropping precipitously.  The sale of digital music does not nearly make up for the loss of sales in CDs.

Back in the day we used to tape record music off the radio to make our mix tapes.  Napster, Limewire and Kazaa took it to a whole new level.  Now we have Goove Shark and Pandora to help negate downloads all together.

How Big is Africa?

Africa always looks big on a map, but how big is it really?

This fascinating map shows that Africa is the equivalent size as all these countries combined:

• China
• USA
• India
• Mexico
• Peru
• France
• Spain
• Papau New Guinea
• Sweden
• Japan
• Germany
• Norway
• Italy
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• Nepal
• Bangladesh
• Greece

Now that is big!

Where the Jobs Are

As always, Wired Magazine did a great job with this chart.  It shows growing job categories are around the country.   The Emerging Epicenters of High Tech Industry.  Who knew that Denver was up and coming place for AeroSpace and that Houston has a growing metal manufacturing industry?

 Nothing much in the Dakotas or Montana, but the mid-west and coasts are booming.

Charting Middle East Relationships

This New York Times map shows the various relationships and paths of strife in the Middle East. A second map, below on the same image, shows the influence of Iran and the US. I like the creativity of the artist in coming up with different ways to show strife "Deep Hatred," "Sworn Enemies," "Deep Suspicion," "Range of Hostility," etc.

All the World's Data

A new study has determined that there are now 276 exabytes of data in the world - that is 276,000,000,000 Gigabytes! That data could be held on a stack of CDs "shooting from the top of your desk to 50,000 miles beyond the moon." Explore how that data breaks down with this graphic, or read the whole artilce in the Washington Post.

Photo from the Washigton Post

Moving Data Charts from Google Public Data Explorer

Google brings data to life by letting you roll a moving chart out over time to see how data changes by year. Google's Public Data Explorer uses data from various sources, including Wolfram Alpha and the World Bank, they have created some very interesting moving charts. Here is one example:

The Clock is Ticking - Data Video

I was sceptical of watching a short movie on Long Island, but this is really a movie about data and it is fantastic.  It uses no spoken words or photos, just statistics, charts and data to describe the decline in wealth, and increase in unemployment, taxes and forclosures on Long Island.

If you like data visualizations you will love the way they've done it in this movie.

The Clock is Ticking from Long Island Index on Vimeo.