Here's a graph I made which shows the total album sales value over the past 30 years or so. As you can see thanks to my handy annotation, after the CD player was launched music industry revenue proceeded to increased throughout the 80s. This makes sense, considering the peak for the cassette wasn't until 1989 when it sold 83 million units in the UK (BBC).
However, after this there's a period where cassettes are in rapid decline, but CDs are still getting going (1990 - 1992, blue circle on graph). Lucky for record companies, they could charge premium prices for the latest technology, £15 - £16 for a CD wasn't uncommon. This, in my opinion, is where the problem lies. Now, the music industry has no new technology that they can charge a big premium for unlike in the Blu-ray market, there was no new purchasing platform for the consumer when they were ready to move on. For this reason, I do believe the market will pick up, perhaps even getting back to a breakeven point, but because of the lag time between the old format (CD) dying and the new format (digital) being taken up by consumers, it may be another 5 years yet.
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