Music Consumption 2018

CDs purchased: Digital album downloads: CDs from LaLa swaps: Digital singles downloaded: Live shows attended:

04 86 - - 50 30

05 76 - - 38 26

06 50 44 69 63 36

07 64 70 28 22 35

08 62 65 11 38 44

09 101 50 7 60 35

10 59 12 - 22 35

11 73 13 - 58 36

12 48 12 - 37 28

13 58 11 - 28 32

14 37 12 - 39 44

15 43 1 - 14 38

16 31 2 - 17 38

17 14 16 - 4 38

18 18 10 - 5 40

Another year, another set of data. Actually, another two years, since I somehow forgot to update this last year. I've managed to reconstruct that, so now we have a complete set of data going back 14 years!

The biggest evident change here is the precipitous decline in CD purchasing over the past two years, as compared to years before. Reason #1: a shift to album downloads from Bandcamp and HDTracks (and, for Amanda Palmer, Patreon). CDs are now a hassle, since after I rip them, I don't really have a use for them. In fact, there's no longer a CD player left in the house. Reason #2: ever since transitioning from iTunes to Roon and subscribing to TIDAL, I have CD-or-higher resolution audio available on-demand. While that does leave me vulnerable to TIDAL's (likely) demise, in the meantime, it makes it hard to justify buying albums unless (a) they are unavailable on TIDAL or (b) I really, really don't want to be without the album.

Of course, this means that I'm now spending $35/month on streaming services ($20 to TIDAL for my full-resolution, high quality home listening; $15 to Spotify family plan for mobile and the rest of the household). While I'd love to rely on TIDAL completely, the truth is that Spotify's mobile app is leagues better and the sharing features are much more universally useful.

So that works out to $420/year in streaming spending, plus a couple dozen album purchases. That works out to roughly $700. That's roughly equivalent to my days of buying ~60 CDs per year (2009 was an outlier, since I was collecting a set of Bach cantatas that year...). But the big difference is that, back in the CD era, the retailer was keeping 50% off the top (and that's not even considering my used CD purchases, where the record label gets nothing). In the streaming era, the streaming services keep about half that much (25-30%).

So, net-net, the music industry is seeing more of my money now than ever before. Even better, the artists generally get a much better royalty cut from direct download services like Bandcamp and streaming services like TIDAL and Spotify, than they previously got for retail CD sales. And that's not mentioning the ~$100/year that I pay directly to Amanda Palmer via Patreon, skipping retailers and record labels both!