In previous forms, you had to take the bad with the good … So in a sense, these bad songs help finance the good ones.

The music industry may wish that we would sate our music needs with albums rather than singles, but that ship has sailed. Now that listening to singles is both easier and better than listening to albums, we’re not going back.

Music Sales of CD’s peaked at $16.4B in 1999. In 2008, music downloads were about 10% of that. Some of that difference was due to piracy and some was due to streaming. And some of those CD sales in 1999 were for replacement of vinyl. But a big piece of the difference was that CD’s forced us to buy the dross with the gold.

Now, we’re only buying the gold.