Streaming is doing to downloads what downloads did to CDs, which is make the media harder to find and the gear that plays them harder to find and more expensive.

Yeah, we are still keeping our CDs around, and maybe a lot of audiophiles will keep their downloads around, but…

Should audiophiles stop investing in downloads and music servers? Or will we have another niche economy where we collect downloads and machines to store and play them back for the next 100 years, like vinyl?

And what is it with media coming and going so quickly these days? Remember Blu-ray [Sony has  stopped producing this, their own format]? DVD-Audio?

This looking at the abyss as downloads and CDs fade into obscurity for the majority of the human race makes this a bit scary for those of us with many $1000s invested and for companies whose product lines depend heavily on these media. So scary that this becomes the third in our special ‘Halloween Series’  posts.

Streaming is Up (source: PandoDaily):

And Downloads are down 13% to 15%. Similar to the decline in CD sales in the early to mid 2000s.

Streamed albums should exceed CD album sales sometime in 2014:

Yay, Electronica! Ouch, Classical. Pop? Eh.

A lot of more great information at this link: Billboard.com : Nielsen’s Q1 numbers

We talked about how streaming will win the media delivery wars and problems like their being no ‘used market’ with streams, so no one can get top quality music at bargain pre-loved prices. On the other hand, if it just costs a few cents to listen to an album, this will drive prices of Downloads and CD down, down, down unless people really want to put the things on ‘repeat’ [like, uh, we do sometimes here :-)] and won’t want to pay 50 cents an hour, $12/day for the delicious pleasure of hearing:

Kruder & Dorfmeister

over and over..

“23% of music streamers used to buy more than one album a month but no longer do so. Download sales are affected most and will continue to feel the pinch with 45% of all music downloaders also music streamers.

Thus although streaming and subscriptions will grow by 238% on 2013 levels to reach $8 billion in 2019, download revenue will decline by 39% – only five percent less than the rate at which CD revenues will fall – leaving streaming and subscriptions representing 70% of all digital revenue.”

Much of this is attributed to the fact that the “first wave” of subscribers to streaming services like Spotify are/were among the most valuable iTunes downloaders.

In the age of streaming, downloading has just become an inconvenience.

From AltPress

From the Music Industry Blog.

Unfortunately, while this is great for music lovers, it is unclear how music artists (musicians) will survive all this: What the Numbers Tell Us About Streaming in 2014

It seems to us that it is best to hedge our bets; the audiophile community could even move enmass to back to vinyl [some certainly think this is happening now, based on the steadily dramatic increase in vinyl sales], or to streaming, like everyone else.

For now, pity the poor manufacturers, who have to support Vinyl, CDs, Downloads and now Streaming. Yeah, I realize that some components, like DACs with a lot of interfaces, span multiple categories. Just relax and go with the flow here. Manufacturers have to be really good at reading tea leaves to figure out that next month triple wireless DSD will be the hot must-have feature next month… but only for a month.