[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Wow, thanks for the link, Malte, very interesting! I’m always interested in statistics (I’m a fact and numbers guy), so this is right up my alley.

So there is no misunderstanding: the numbers Malte quoted are not indicative of any rise in physical media sales, they are still “shrinking”. However, as they shrink, the average spending per paying person for physical media increased by +49% from 2015 to 2025.

This doesn’t mean the market or the revenue grew by 49% (the full statistics clearly show the opposite), but that the people who still buy physical media today spend significantly more money per person on average than they did ten years ago.

Which of of course typical for a niche market. When CDs were a mass product, they were there right and left, and while our specialty label releases had pretty much stable prices through all the decades (ignoring shipping/customs), I’ve bought a lot of cheap CDs over the years in bulk, even new shrink-wrapped CDs were often on sale or priced in stores at times for €5.-. Not to mention that used-CD stores had full bins. That’s all gone.

Now CDs occupy the same kind of niche vinyl occupied two decades ago and has ever since. A small but dedicated group of collectors, who cherish their releases and want their music on physical media. And like vinyl, that leads to an increase in price.

All I need to to is scroll through my Amazon list for some of the classical recordings I’ve bought over the years there, and compare the price I paid then to what the same release would cost me now. It’s often tripled or quadrupled in price, sometimes even more. Sometimes, there are offers of used CDs way more expensive than they were when I bought them new.

Just an example from my own Amazon orders:

I bought this album on November 9th 2020 via Amazon for €7.25. A perfectly “normal” mainstream classical music release by a big label that I bought “on sale”.

Now I just took a look at what that same release would cost me today, not even six years later:

I could mention quite a few such examples. Of course, I also find some CDs that cost more or less the same, and you can still find good deals, but chances are, in a few years those good deals will cost a lot more or will be hard to find as well.