Is The Compact Disc Heading Towards Extinction?

Quick question: How many CD’s have you bought this year? I’m willing to bet that most people would say less than five. Yup, the sales of recorded music in Compact Disc format are dropping at a pretty fast rate over the last couple of years and most people are turning to digital music. I personally have probably bought like 3 or fewer CD’s in the last 2 years, but I’m pretty sure Amazon.com’s MP3 store is happy about that since I have purchased large amounts of MP3 albums from them in recent times.

Judging by a report from IFPI (a recording industry advocacy group), it looks like digital music is becoming the media of choice for recorded music. From 2007 to 2008 in the U.S. alone, digital music sales increased 16.5% while actual physical sales of music (CD, LP, Cassettes, DVD audio, etc.) went down a whopping 31.2%. Figure in all other countries worldwide and digital sales in the same time period went up 24% and physical sales went down 15%.

The CD is not ready to go away just yet though. According to a recent report from the NPD Group (a market research company), the CD still accounted for 65% of all music sold in the first half of 2009 while digital music made up the other 35%. However, back in 2007 digital music accounted for only 20% of all music sold. With the sales numbers of digital music rising at about the same percentage that CD sales are dropping, it’s pretty safe to say that the CD is heading the way of the LP, 8-track tape, cassette tape, and the emperor penguin: virtually extinct, and it will happen sooner rather than later.