The History of Music Media - From Vinyl To Bitstreams

A creative timeline view of The History of: Music Media infographic from Indigo Boom. The colors track the popularity of each new and old source of music media through the years. From left to right it goes 0% popular to 100% popular. 

Selling music as recordings first became possible in 1877 with the introduction of the phonograph cylinder. Since then media formats have developed and radically changed the way we listen, and recently even where we can listen to music. We have looked at the last 30 years of music format development and popularity in the infographic below.

Beautiful, colorful design. This is a vertical stacked area chart covering the last 30+ years of music sales. You can see that in 1980 (where the chart begins) vinyl was already in decline. CDs have had a big run, but downloads are obviously growing to become the new dominant method to get music.

I like that the design tells one story really well, and doesn’t get into a whole bunch of extra data points. It’s a simple, clear story to the readers who can understand the content quickly and then move on.  

The source listing of The RIAA is too vague.  Source listings should include a link to the specific data so others can examine the original dataset if they wish.  I went to the RIAA site, and it appears that they are selling this information in a report. Publishing the data publicly in an infographic may be a violation of the terms of service or copyright of the report, but I can’t tell because I can’t determine where the specific data originated.

The URL to the infographic landing page should be included in the footer of the design so readers can find the original when they come across a smaller version posted on another site.  Not all sites are good about linking back to the original.

Thanks to Bogdan for sending in the link!