Music Technology, a brief history lesson

Every successful new technological innovation in music recording and playback has led to an expansion of the market for recorded music.



MP3s are showing the same trend, their curve beginning in the late 1990s with Napster etc. There is a price effect, as new technology reduces the unit cost of a recording. There is also reported to be a replacement effect - people who bought vinyl, downsizing their record shelves to CD-size. And I think also a generational effect, as the children of the 60s and 70s continue to purchase new music in their middle age, where the generation before them did not, thereby expanding the market.