A couple of weeks ago during a less than ravishing conversation with my brother about music, he willingly divulged information that I immediately used against him in the most mocking tone possible: he wanted to buy more CDs. But like – way more CDs. He alluded to a very large, very exorbitant CD order. Of course, I sarcastically jeered him to his face and told him to just give up the dream. He and music had a great run, but surely, it was now over. (Yeah, I’m sort of an asshole. Whatever.)
As if we needed any further proof that streaming music has taken over the universe, it’s now officially official: Streaming music made more money last year than CDs, with Spotify and the like pulling in a hefty $1.87 million in revenue compared to the Compact Disc’s $1.85, according to the RIAA. Sure, the difference isn’t ginormous, but the numbers only further signify the eventual death of the CD as we know it. (Do kids these days even know what a CD is anymore? And did I really just use the phrase “kids these days”!? Moving on…)
Physical formats do represent a larger slice of the revenue pie for the industry – 32 percent vs. streaming’s 25, but that is almost definitely due to the resurgence and trendiness of vinyl, which has seen a bigger comeback this year than Missy Elliot at the Super Bowl. LPs, for the first time since 1987, have brought in double-digit percentages, bringing in a respectable $315 million.
While many artists like Bjork and Taylor Swift have refused to grant permission to streaming music companies, clearly they have every right to do so (just as I have every right not to pay for shitty fucking music by Taylor Swift). From an artist’s perspective, I get it. From a consumer’s perspective – you’re going to fall far behind if you haven’t dived in yet.
So while my brother is dead set on furthering his irrelevancy with another order at Amazon (or wherever the hell one buys CDs nowadays), I’ll be listening to new singles the millisecond they drop. It is, after all, the new industry norm.
I hope you meant billion instead of million… $1.87 million would barely cover Justin Bieber’s entourage. 🙂
Taylor Swift will be just fine without streaming, as digital downloads have an even bigger chunk of the pie and that’s where her bread and butter is.
I still have an unnecessary amount of CDs that I ultimately need to digitize and part with once and for all, but for me digital trumps vinyl or CDs, if only because I continue to live in small apartments and an iPod is much more convenient than a record player and a stack of vinyl, as much as I find the idea enjoyable (and at one point had just that in my bedroom in high school). The places I listen to music, I’ll never be able to tell the difference between one and another, even as much as I love listening to music overall.
I hear ya on the apartment living, man. Up until our home purchase, we were in the same boat. Now with a little more space, I like to have a few more toys laying around =)
You make a good point about where you listen to music, too. In a lot of settings, esp when you’re on the go, the difference in quality can be barely noticeable. I still have all of my CDs. At one point I was digitizing them and storing on my hard drive…but then that soon stopped…then buying CDs stopped…then I started streaming. So streaming/vinyl is the world I’m living in now. It’ll be hard to part with my CDs…I won’t get rid of all of them, but I should definitely downsize.
I have been downsizing my collection here and there. For awhile, when CDs actually had value at FYE, I was trading in, but most of what I have they don’t want. There’s also CDs I will always keep for various reasons – autographs, favorite albums, the one that I literally spent five years trying to find before the Internet (it finally got released in digital form last fall, so hopefully it won’t go away again). But I may start popping a few up on eBay and see what I can accomplish.