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posted by janrinok on Saturday June 16 2018, @04:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the something-you-can-own dept.

Kim Bayley breaks down UK spending statistics to show that superfans buying old school physical media are providing for 15% of the UK's total retail music market, even when streaming is counted. She asserts that curtailing the availability of these physical storage media will damage not just retailers, but the overall health of the music industry itself. In doing so, she presents a strong economic case for why the music industry should treasure its vinyl and CD superfans.

Naturally it would have a clear financial cost: according to ERA's research those 157,000 vinyl Superfans spent between them £63m on vinyl in 2017, equivalent to more than half a million – 525,000 – premium music subscriptions.

In other words, lose a town's worth of vinyl buyers the size of Chelmsford and you need a city's worth of premium music subscribers the size of Manchester to make up the loss.

When it comes to CD, the impact is even greater. ERA's researches show that in 2017 an incredible 292,000 Britons spent £400 or more on the format. That's equivalent to buying a CD virtually every week.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @09:57AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16 2018, @09:57AM (#693903)

    Sorry to interrupt your stream of consciousness but unless you are planning on selling some rare disc + packaging to collectors, they are not an investment. CDs hold digital information that can be copied endlessly.

    An M-Disc or some other future archival storage medium may be "an investment" if it can store a large amount of data without degradation for a long time. Because you can be assured that obscure data contained on it will probably not be lost. But CDs will degrade and lose their data within decades.

  • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday June 16 2018, @10:24AM

    by MostCynical (2589) on Saturday June 16 2018, @10:24AM (#693907) Journal

    Quality music at (reasonably) affordable price
    Not shares, property, or investment for the furture, but still, an investment in the music and the performer.

    Way beyond the "investment" (time, money, or interest) a "young person" is going to give any performer.

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex