I thought I’d hijack a post by Nick Gonzalez, of the Running with Foxes blog.

Having majored in economics, I’ve been a fan of Swivel from the start. They’re solving the problem of easily displaying data online, which I had to deal with myself as an intern at an economic development office back in college.

I’ve been perusing the site and came across this particularly striking graph that shows the gentle rise and fall of sales of vinyl, cassette, CD, and iPod sales as one format replaces the other (unfortunately itunes sales were not pegged). CD sales seem to have peaked after a steep rise out of the eighties and into the nineties. But the more interesting part is the decline in sales. Looking at the slopes and peaks for each of the formats, you can see that the peaks are becoming steeper and the transitions quicker. People are continually choosing the more portable format.

The decline in CD sales is happening, and it’s only a matter of time before CD’s are the domain of audiophiles (At least DJs still use vinyl). Eyeballing it, CDs seem to have another 10 years till they’re phased out of the mainstream, although it could come sooner.

I’d be interested to see how the same data compares for video sales.

Quite the interesting read. I’m interested to see the sales/adoption graph of each of the Apple iPods.

PJG