Phasing out of Compact Disc

CD sales peaked at about a billion units in 2000. The last data I saw (2013) showed that it was the latest of a dozen straight years of declining sales, bottoming out at +/- 200 million units. Since 2010, the avg annual decline has been small, so it appears that CD sales aren't really being "phased out", they're just slowly dying off. At what point do "major labels" stop releasing CDs altogether? Does it matter? It's pretty clearly a dying format.

I don't have data from the 1960's, but, by comparison, in the '70s, LP sales peaked at +/- 200 million units. Obviously, that was a smaller (unit) market for recorded music than we have today. Contrary to what many here seem to believe, however, the LP was not "killed off" by CD, it was killed off by cassettes, which displaced LP sales at basically a 1 for 1 rate up to 1985. Then CD joined the party and LPs essentially disappeared as a meaningful piece of the market.

As a practical matter, LP is still dead. Unit sales might make up 1% of the market and dollar sales might be 1.5 to 2%.

Martykl, thank you for a very informative post.

Enjoy the music.

Within just 6 months after the initial introduction of the CD in 1982, 50% of the existing LP manufacturing plants in North America had closed their doors - and they had done so at a time when CD sales still made up only a small fraction of the remaining music media sales. More LP closures were to follow after that. Apparently the LP did not die because of "sales" actually, but because of a calculated decision to shut LP production down, having the effect of giving the masses no real alternative but to switch to CD's.

The unanswered question in my mind has been whether or not the early shut downs (in the face of the still rather large LP share of the market at the time) had become, in fact, largely contractual? Or was it simply a result of the industry "come-to-Jesus" meeting that undoubtedly would've occurred before and as the CD was being launched (and the LP manufacturers simply saw the writing on the wall and *voluntarily* closed their doors in the face of expectations of plummeting sales and mounting [internal] industry hype).

But, I am curious as to why so many LP makers caved as early as they did. Were they paid or compensated to close their doors when they did?...in order to facilitate a speedy changeover to CD that otherwise, were it left to be sales driven in a free market, might have dragged out longer than industry backers of CD might have been financially willing to accept?

Can I get a "kickback" here??

Might there be similar deals brewing behind closed doors now in respect to downloads or streaming? I'm thinking yes, but we'll see. Happy listening.

The real victim in all this was audio cassettes, which if you'll pardon me for saying so are more musical and more dynamic than either LP or CD. By the end of the cassette era the frequency response was quite good, good enough considering how inherent musical and dynamic they are. No medium is perfect, but cassettes are the closest to real music in my opinion. Tape is a natural medium. It breathes.

"Tape is a natural medium. It breathes."

Some would call that hiss/noise.