Disruptions in the music industry

By Siddharth Singh, 23rd February, 2015

The music industry has been prone to disruptions in the sale of recorded music, as is evidenced by the graph below made by Michael DeGusta on Business Insider.

Note that the graph only shows the sales data (adjusted for inflation and population) of recorded music. It does not contain data on the sales of concert and live music tickets (and payments made by pubs to musicians). My hunch is that while per capita expenditure on recorded music has been falling since 2000, overall contribution to music artists has increased.

Post script: in the article linked above, Michael takes down the less-than-satisfactory (to put it mildly) analytical methods employed by one of the world’s most famous consultancies. Fun read.