Why are CD sales down? Rather than blaming piracy, this article in Business Week [1] suggests that there are only so many hours in a day, and we are increasingly busy entertaining ourselves in ways other than listening to CDs:
There are only so many hours in a day for each of us — the consumers of entertainment — to consume entertainment. Various new forms of entertainment that catch on have to displace some of the time we spent on our former diversions.
While CD sales are down, the number of households with DVD players more than tripled over the past five years to 84 million and sales of DVDs rose to 1.1 billion from 313 million in 2001. Does anyone really think that consumers could buy 800 million more DVDs, worth $10 billion or more, without cutting back on some other entertainment spending? Similarly, the number of households with broadband Internet connections almost quadrupled to over 36 million. At $30 a month, that’s another $9 billion a year right there. The number of households with access to video on demand hit 24 million in 2005, ten times the 2001 level.
This article backs up its thesis with some interesting statistics regarding the way we’ve reallocated our entertainment hours over the past five years.
Print this post [2]
[3]