Saturday, February 19, 2011

Nice graph showing decling sales in the music industry AND a lesson in Creative Destruction. A two-fer for a Saturday morning

When I teach Joseph Schumpeter's version of "Creative Destruction", I use the evolution of the technology we use to listen to music. This graph shows the emergence and decline of the various modes of delivery.  Perhaps technology has gone too far. With the advent of the digital age, pirating music has become so commonplace that the revenues in the music industry have declined significantly, perhaps permanently, and I am not sure how they can recover. Can the industry survive without selling music at the retail level? Is this actually a good thing because music will become much less concentrated in the hands of a few music mogels? OR will it consolidate into even fewer hands?
Source: Business Insider

1 comment:

  1. I see this as foreshadowing for every type of media: torrents can be used to quickly download any movie of your choice, sometimes even before it is out in theaters. treeBooks (opposed to eBooks) are now obsolete and Borders book store just went out of business after prospering for almost half a century... I work at Best Buy and we can't keep Kindles on the shelves. While users pay for the eBooks they download for their eReaders, its only a matter of time before books are (more) easily pirated.

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