Comments on: Music Retail: The Rise of Digital

By: Joe Tran

Joe Tran — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:25:59 +0000

Wow! I really love this information. As an unsigned/independent artist who recently had a record released digitally through many of those online stores…it definitely makes me comfortable to know, I put my product in the right places…

By: gabriel

gabriel — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:52:29 +0000

Actually, variable pricing has been very advantageous for my band Letters Burning, as most of our album sales comes from either iTunes or from selling physical cds at our shows.

Personally, I love having a physical cd in hand, and love to look at the artwork and read the lyrics. But iTunes also allows you to download the artwork and also lyrics if available, so that you can read/see as you’re listening to the track.

By: Colin

Colin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:13:02 +0000

I love these infographics!

By: Phil Bosh

Phil Bosh — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:44:56 +0000

ummm nice post but I flat out dont believe these figures. In Australia, at least, there are barely any places left where you can buy CD’s other than Target and similar stores… and these stores now have more iPod accessories taking shelf space than CD’s. At one point there were multiple CD stores in each shopping centre.

If these figures are true (and it’s on the internet so it must be:) then it’s only a matter of 10-12 years and there will be no more physical music sold or bought other than as collectors items or by people who refuse to let the CD die because they have some sort of emotional connection with the disc rather than the music.

I would love to see this study broken down into age groups. Under 35′s would be about 95% to 5% imho.

Anyway what I take from this post is while this is slightly surprising it still is inevitable that we will purchase all our music from a screen. Not to mention movies… dont get me started.

By: Tony C

Tony C — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:02:34 +0000

The data is from NPD, not Mint.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:20:30 +0000

Great job and this is very interesting. I think the majority of people still feel that physical CDs are a better value. You receive uncompressed audio with physical packaging and product. Often times it is the same price as an mp3 album. I would really like to see Amazon mp3 statistics in more of your charts.

By: Matt Griffin

Matt Griffin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:54:04 +0000

Is this based on the information in card holder credit card statements? If so, then the iTunes stats probably include apps, movies, and TV show sales because they all show up the same on statements. Or maybe it’s based on how Mint.com customers manually categorize transactions so some could be music-only and some could be all products available through iTunes.