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!