The State of Digital Music in 2006

wh0pper writes "Designtechnica has an excellent article on the state of digital music in 2006. Digital music accounted for only six percent of total music sales in 2005. Yet even that is a massive increase over the year before, a whopping 194 percent, which is fiscally valuable as the sales of CDs continue to decrease (although even with digital sales, the record labels experienced another downturn in 2005). While the young, usually the first to adopt and adapt to new technology, have been downloading and swapping music for quite some time, there's been a ripple effect into the older, warier area of the population, one that will only increase. Thank--or blame--Apple and its iPod, or any of the many other makes selling like hotcakes in the stores.

Comments

When did CDs become analog?

[caenorhabditas]

I always thought that CDs were digital. Now I hear that digital music only accounts for six percent of music sales? I knew LPs were making a bit of a comeback, but I didn't know it was that big. Everyone must be really enjoying that "warmer" sound.

Re:When did CDs become analog?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Wait, the salesman at Definitive Audio told me that I needed to buy dampening rings to put on my CDs to "clean up the waveform". If CDs were digital, for example with 16 bit samples at 44.1kHz with 6 bits of Reed-Solomon error correction for every 8 bits of data and some interleaving to mitigate scratches, then a sales rep at a High End retailer would have been talking nonsense!