Intel's Ronler Acres Plant

Silicon Forest
If the type is too small, Ctrl+ is your friend

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Ahoy, ya black hearted thug!



Good graph. Not overburdened with extraneous detail, does a good job of showing what's going on AND the bottom of the graph is at zero. Many graphs these days move the baseline up to emphasis the changes going on. In this case, if they didn't include Downloads, they could have moved the baseline up somewhere over $10 Billion and it would have looked like the music industry had really collapsed. Watch for this evil technique, it's probably being used on a screen near you as we speak.

I have to admit, I don't spend much money on music. For a while, back when I was feeling flush, I would buy a CD once in a while, but they mostly ended up sitting on the shelf, ignored, so I stopped that, plus I'm not feeling so flush anymore.

My kids spend some unknown amount of money on music. One of them even has a fledgling collection of vinyl and seems intent on buying more.

These days I get most of my music off of YouTube. The ads are annoying, but there is a mute button and I use the heck out it. Piracy, or even buying music, is more trouble than it's worth, by the time I've got copies of the tunes loaded and arranged to my satisfaction I'm no longer interested in listening to that tune, and I've yet to find a sequence of tunes prepared by somebody else that can hold my interest for more than five or ten minutes.

For comparison, the global advertising budget is somewhere around $400 billion, and the global market for illegal drugs is somewhere between $100 and $500 billion. So recorded music is really kind of small potatoes. I wonder how much money is spent on live music? Might be as much or more. A big concert can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some bands are forgoing recording completely in favor of concerts. Or so I've heard.

Inspired by Dustbury.

No comments: