This has been floating around. It’s interesting if limited in scope. As someone who has written a book on the transformation of the music industry from one based on a “performance economy” to an “economy of recordings” it’s an interesting graph, but it is something of a reductio ad absurdum. Truth is the recording industry is not the music industry, even if that conflation has happened for almost 60 years. The new work I am writing tries to make this clear: the music industry is a set of practices that are interested in the production of music-oriented goods and services. This means it could be a live performance, a band t-shirt, a recording, publishing rights, etc. That graph, well, would be a little too difficult to easily visualize right now. Still, maybe we should try.