Mark Perry is professor emeritus of economics at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in economics and finance since 1996. Mark is also an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow emeritus. He holds graduate degrees in economics from George Mason University and an MBA degree in finance from the University of Minnesota.
The lady in the Rolling Stones song was “practiced in the art of deception.” Mark is learned in the art of destruction — creative destruction, as Joseph Schumpeter called it. He has forwarded his “updated visualization of recorded music sales by format share from 1973 to 2024 based on sales data just released for 2024 by the Recording Industry Association of America.” He observes: “Given our ages and passion for music, we both experienced first-hand the evolution of music formats from LPs to 8-tracks to cassette tapes to CDs and now streaming (Spotify and Pandora are my favorites).”
Mark has created thousands of graphs, charts, figures, tables, maps, and animated visualizations over the past 20 years. “Of all those graphics,” he writes, “this is my favorite visualization of all time, and I just updated it with data through 2024.” He adds:
What’s special about the visualization for people of my generation is that we lived through all of these music formats and witnessed the dominance of vinyl through the early 1980s, then the rise and dominance of cassette tapes through the early 1990s, followed by the total dominance of CDs through the early 2000s when their market share peaked at 95.7 percent in 2002. Then, the mix of digital downloads and streaming music overtook CD sales by 2011 before streaming music took over about ten years ago, with a 48% share in 2015 before reaching a peak last year of 84.2 percent market share. In the early 2000s, vinyl sales dropped to almost nothing before returning to the No. 2 spot in 2020 for the first time since 1984 and hitting a 35-year high of 8.2 percent last year, the highest format share since 1989.
I have embedded Mark’s “visualization” below. Readers can also access it here. Directions (per Mark): “Click the white arrow in the blue circle (lower left corner) to start the Bar Chart Race!”
