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.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday June 16 2018, @11:18PM
> Anybody who is interested in audio quality can without much effort pirate an album in 320 kbps MP3 or FLAC.
Almost all of which is sourced by ripping from a (SA)CD of some sort. The CD is the only mass available high quality format left. If they went away and all that was available is a mono, crappily compressed streamrip, where exactly do you think the high quality source will come from for you to be able to pirate it in FLAC or 320kbs?