Based on sale records throughout the past several years, the music industry has experienced an impressive revenue growth with streaming services as well as a return in popularity of physical music; Vinyls, CDs and Cassettes.
In recent years, streaming services, such as Apple Music and Spotify, have dominated most of the music industry’s sales. During the seven years that Spotify has been recognized by the RIAA streaming outperformed downloads, which had previously been the highest grossing form of music distribution. Currently, on demand-streaming makes up 80% of the industry’s total revenues.
The fantastic irony of the music empire is as the industry constantly becomes more digital, a resurgence of material music merchandise has been born due to “human factors”. Despite the major decline that vinyl records underwent throughout the 2000s, currently the products earn an annual average of $400 million.
CDs, whose popularity had been waning in previous years, have fortunate news as well. The discs generated $247.9 million in the first half of 2019’s musical commerce. These seemingly outdated products continue to be relevant since humans develop a connection with the physical products almost as if they return them to a simpler, more nostalgic time.
The modern day music industry goes to show that although one form of distribution is more advanced, human beings will still appreciate the older, slower and less compact predecessors.
Edited By: Arianna Juliano (@ariannajuliano)