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Originally Posted by Revmen  The interesting part is not that the sales are down, but why they are down and what the industry in doing about it. |
Well, as I've pointed out in other threads, if you look at not just the time since the peak, but the decades before the peak, then you'll see that sales were going up consistently since the beginnings of the rock/pop music industry. It went up during various economic crises, including the S&L disaster which was about as big as the recent one.
AND, it peaked in late 1999/early 2000, but the falloff in the rate of growth started in like 1998, then it slid up to the peak about a year to a year and a half later. So, in the middle of one of the biggest economic booms of all time, the growth rate started falling off, and actually peaked before the bubble burst. And it's basically been going downhill ever since.
You can't really blame the economic situation, since the rate continued to rise during previous very bad economic problems, with just one fairly small dip, and it started shallowing out at a point when money was growing on trees basically.
So, what started in 1997 that would have caused a very suddenly change in the number of records being purchased within a year? Even if it had just evened out that would have been a big change relative to what had come before. For growth to come to a halt and then start falling, that was a far larger change.