NEWS: CD Sales To Reach Negative Figures Within Decade
New calculations made on the back of a beer mat estimate that at the current linear rate of decline, sales of CDs (‘compacted diskettes’) will be negative within the decade. Rather than selling CDs the music industry will be receiving millions of CDs each year and will struggle to find somewhere to keep them all.
A number of initiatives were tested for boosting CD sales in 2011:
- Albums were put on sale in newsagents disguised as packets of crisps.
- Classic albums were re-issued bundled with 10 to 20 inferior albums.
- CDs were made 500% larger, to make them easier for consumers to find.
The initiatives do not appear to have halted the decline and some in the music industry have resigned themselves to the inevitability of negative sales.
“We’re preparing to find space on our shelves for millions of CDs,” said music industry spokesman Timothy Wardrobe, “My wife is not going to be happy.”
No reliable sales figures exist for music downloads since they are nearly invisible to the naked eye, and therefore too small to reliably count. MiniDiscs saw impressive results, with annual sales doubling to nearly 10 sold*.
* SOURCE: Bloke down the pub. Margin of error = 10 MiniDiscs.
