Who’s Buying Music Today vs 10 Years Ago

Guest Post by Bobby Owsinski on Music 3.0 Blog

A recent survey by MusicWatch looked at the demographics of CD and digital music buyers back in 2004 and compared them to 2014. What they found shouldn't be too surprising, because it's almost exactly what you'd expect.

In 2004, the largest demo of CD buyers was age 36 to 50 at 25% (and it's 26% in 2014).
In 2014, the largest demographic of CD buyers were age 50+ at almost 35%.

In 2004, ages 13 to 17 purchased the most digital downloads at 25%, followed by ages 36 to 50 at 24%.
In 2014, ages 36 to 50 purchase the most at 26%. Ages 18 to 25 was second at 23%.

Surprisingly enough, both in 2004 and 2014, women purchased more CDs than men by a roughly 5% margin.

That flipped around for digital music though, as men purchased far more digital music in 2004 by a 60 to 40% margin. Today women buy more than men by 53 to 47%.

Of course, all this may be moot in a few years as both CDs and digital downloads face ever diminished sales. It's still a huge part of the business in terms of revenue, but the writing is on the wall that streaming music will be the dominant distribution method for some time to come unless a new distribution technology is introduced that takes the industry by storm.