It’s very cool when a simple animated GIF can sum up everything in a few seconds. This one above (stolen from Consequence of Sound which got it from Digital Music News) gives the whole story of 30 years the music industry in a blink of an eye, so you will never need anything else to understand what happened.
Year by year, you see the evolution of what people buy and consume, from vinyl totally dominating the market with cassettes in the 80s, to the overwhelming dominance of CDs from the 90s till the mid-00s, and finally the takeover of MP3s, downloads and streaming services from the late 00s to present.
Digital Music News created the GIF to document the evolution of these different technologies, using Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) data from 1983 to 2013. In 2013, there is a large slice of pie reserved for on-demand streaming, and subscriptions to diverse streaming services, whereas physical album sales have considerably dropped and only represent 30.4%, against 40% for the downloads. You can even notice the resurgence of vinyl (3%): whereas it was around 0.1% in 2005, it reaches 3% in 2013, and it’s probably more than this where I live (hipster country aka Silver Lake), but let’s face it, the whole country is not gonna buy massive quantity of vinyl in the following years.
But it is the rise of streaming services which is the most remarkable during the last years, taking a big chuck of that pie in 2013 (more than 21%) and there is no reason it’s gonna stop soon. You can easily predict that this red slice (CDs) will become microscopic in a few years, whereas the brown-orange one (representing streaming services) will blow up to worrisome proportions, worrisome for musicians who already can’t make a living of their art. When you watched it with this in mind, you realize there is a lot of ongoing drama in this GIF.
