Entertainment For Lively Minds
£67 a year on music ? Is that all??
I was taken aback to read in Eamonn Forde's article on CD packaging the nugget of information that in 2007 the average music buyer spent £67 on music.
Last week I managed to complete a long-deferred trip to the marvellous Record Collector in Sheffield, where I joyfully spent £60 in one go : a bunch of vinyl - 2 Jimmy Reed LPs, the single of Rock & Roll High School, and the Holly & The Italians LP : a bunch of CDs - SAHB at the BBC, the new Ry Cooder, an old Alice Coltrane : and the book "Last Shop Standing".
Obviously this was a treat, and I don't often spend this much in one splurge. But £67 doesn't seem to be a lot of money to spend on music. And I would struggle to maintain my sanity through the rest of the year if I couldn't buy another record or CD until 1 Jan 2010.
I'd appreciate some more context from Eamonn on the figure - is this based on total retail turnover divided by some proportion of the UK population (everyone over 12 and under 65, say ?)
What does the Massive think ? (Obviously, many of us are £50 guy)
- More from el hombre malo.
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Well,
In the years BC (before children) I probably spent at least ten times that. Now, probably £100-£200 on CDs.
I probably spend about
I probably spend about £5-600 a year, mostly through amazon. I generally buy 80-100 albums a year and have done for many a year although i probably spend less now. I am surprised the topic starter managed to spend £60 in 'record collector', I can't stand the place and can never find anything due to it's haphazard layout. I think the internet has pretty much eradicated the need for record shops, most of which were a necessary evil. One of the few exceptions to this would be 'selectadisc' in Nottingham which sadly closed in March.
I buy around 60 - 80 CDs a year
I've always thought this was about average....but now I'm not so sure!
more than most people's entire collection
in my experience. Not of course anyone here. Some people probably have that many by one artist.
BC it was probably about the same (about 1000 CDs over 20 years), but is a lot fewer now I have children.
I have just
perused my orders with Amazon for last 6 months and they total 45 cd's. Some have been £4.99, most have been £8.98 or £9.98 and a couple have been £11.98. I would say about £400 for the year to date. I expect the second half of the year may be slightly less and that number includes some pre-orders not yet released but I would expect my total for year to be around £700 or just over 10 peoples spend taking the average.
This is probably more than I have previously bought in numbers and probably in spending too but if I were to still smoke I would be spending about £150.00 per month on fags easy.
By the way
enjoy last shop standing - I am about three quarters of the way through and loving it.
Went myself to Record Collector
recently and although didn't spend anything like £60, more like £20, and thats about my average on a record shop visit.
Record Collector is indeed a great shop, a veritable treasure trove. You could easily lose an afternoon in that shop
i go passed it everyday
which can be a bit of a distraction. it is impossible to leave without a purchase. mmm, thinking about it has inspired me to pop in during my lunch break.
I visit the Record shop every week
I like to see the albums (vinyl and cd) that come out every week.I also like to order albums that have been reviewed in Word or a special limited release.I spend about 100 to 150 canadian(60 to 70 pounds) a month on music.I also buy Word, Uncut, Mojo, every month for the cd and the read.All in all a positive hobby that I will continue until the day I die.
We're not average!
I doubt that anybody here is anything like average when it comes to music buying unless they are constrained by lack of money. I'd like to think that makes us "above average" but I think it probably makes us "not average"!
I don't think I spend as much as I used to but that's only because I don't have to. I start with £13 a month on Emusic which already nearly three times the average but that gets me about 7 albums a month. I can then "top up" from there from Amazon etc.
£67 a year is not the budget of a music fan. What can you get for £5.50 a month? That would get you the Word sampler and a few ring tones!
As the man said
"There's only music so that there's new ring tones"...
I suspect Mr/Ms Average are the singles buyers of yore...
Gigs are where the money goes
I recently in eight days saw Nick Lowe, Jackson Browne and Eric Clapton at the Albert Hall. The total for the six tickest was getting on for £300. I would say I spend around £1500 on either gigs or cds every year with more than half on gigs, a much bigger proportion than before.
We're definitely not average
I have cut back spending a lot in the last couple of years (after-kids and mid-recession) and now spend only about £40 now - although my non-Word reading missus spends around £80, so it balances out.
However, I know that our house's music collection is far and away abnormal and it amounts to about 700 CDs.
Is that 700 CDs, or 1 collection of CDs?
I renewed my house contents insurance recently and mentioned the CD collection only to be informed that this would be considered as a 'single collection' and therefore not covered as it was worth more than £1,000. I was also asked to provide an intemised list as they were not initially prepared to believe that anyone had more than 150 CDs which they said was the average.
You have been warned. I changed insurance companies to one that treats each CD as one little tiny item.
Insurance companies ...arrrgh!
I had the same problem a nearly 20 years ago so I was a bit wary when ringing round for quotes the following year. One person said that it would be OK because all my CDs wouldn't be considered to be a collection but ones by the same artist would be. "So that's alright" she said "As long as you don't have more than 10 by a single artist you'll be covered"... "bye" I said!
The insurance people may say 150 CDs is "average"...
... but some research a few years ago put it at 30 CDs per household, which I thought was ludicrously small... BUT, once I had this number in my head, I did have to admit that in "normal" houses (i.e. friends not really into music, neighbours etc.), this was probably about right, and moreover that all the CDs would be "the usual suspects" (Dido, Coldplay, Lighthouse Family, Simply Red, some compilations.)
On average I buy about 10 CDs a month, but 7 or 8 of those will be 2nd hand, either from t'internet, my local 2nd hand emporium or charity shops, so probably £40 a month in total, plus downloads & gig tickets, so I'll say £800+ per year all in all...
Books
Not only the lack of CDs but also the lack of books when you go into most other people's houses....
CD collections
Take a photograph of the collection racked on their shelves and keep an up-to-date inventory.
When we were flooded and all the CDs were lost, the insurance company paid out without question. We agreed on a nominal £7.50 value per CD.
The loss assessor explained that the number of CDs on the list looked about right for the number of shelves in the photos - that was good enough for him.
I had always sent an updated photo and inventory each year at renewal time.
I do the same
After a friend's flat was flooded by a collapsing bathroom from the flat upstairs and when he tried to claim for 1200 albums, 1000 singles, and about 400 CDs, he was told by his insurers "HMV don't have 1200 albums. You're being silly here."
Loving the insurance comments
When we moved house the one thing that had to travel in our car was 20 boxes of CD's, as the insurance cover on the pantechnicon wouldn't stretch to them if the lorry exploded en route...
I daren't even think.....
2 e music subscriptions (don't ask!) and the record library keep down costs, but I still seem to hoover up far more than I should. I just can't resist walking past any outlet that sells CDs, on the off chance there will be something. The recession has therefore helped me by its annihilation of high street sellers. I am consciously downsizing amazon and play.com purchases and bought only 1 from Oxfam Music and Books on saturday, a very good impulse buy of Eric Bibb's "Diamond Days", which didn't disappoint one bit, despite never having knowingly heard any of his stuff before, knowing just the name. I passed on quite a good looking Tito Puente retrospective.
My CDs are counted as an item of value "> £1000", which was how it was originally detailed many moons back when I asked.
Think of ourselves as keeping the average up for all the other people with only horses and hounds in their life.......
Running a horse is more expensive than any record collection!
and a CD shelf doesn't need mucking out every morning :-)
oh god
don't say that - the daughter wants a horse. I've been trying to avoid thinking about how much it would cost.
I dont like to think
about it but I must average £50 a week on cd,s & old vinyl, maybe two gigs a month for me & my cheaper to run half plus as you say Word, Mojo & Uncut to feed my lust. It all adds up to the GDP of a small third world country. Can't stop though, been doing it since I was a wee lad & I got a Saturday job in a record shop & got paid in LP's.
I'd spend more than that in a month quite easily
I've got half a dozen different cd purchases winging my way via ebay. I ordered $70.00US worth via an American website just yesterday which is something I do every couple of weeks. I cannot walk past a charity shop without checking out their music section, my last purchase in one was Best of Duke Ellington for $1.00, safe to say I didn't have that in mind when I walked in.
It's an addiction but I don't apologise, it's my only vice if you don't include drinking, smoking, gambling or chasing loose women.
That figure explained
It was from the BPI Statistical Handbook. They look at the total spent at retail on recorded music and then divide that by the number of people in the UK over the age of 12. That figure, tragically, is the average spend.
There are, of course, lots of people who just do not buy music. Ever. Like my mum. And dad. The fact is that Word readers are the anomaly here and what we all spend is way, way, way above the average. But that means there are a hell of a lot of people not spending a brown penny on recorded music.
And the worst bit about all this? The UK has the highest per-capita spend on recorded music anywhere in the world.
thanks for clarifying
I suspected that it was some really simple arithmetic.
Obviously we here are a self-selecting bad sample set.
Even on rough figures, at Fopp prices of £5 for a CD, that's one album a month and an extra one at Christmas. Even back in the days when I was a poor student in the early 80s, I bought more records than that (by a long way!). And having looked at some 12" singles recently as I was ripping them to MP3, some of them were £2.79!
More stats
The average price for an album in the UK last year was £7.97. In 2000, it was £10.98.
averaging things out
If you spend an average of £67 on items that cost £7.97, that is slightly over 8 albums in a year. Maybe 8 albums and a couple of singles.
Pffft.
The Top 8 best-selling albums of 2008 were..
according to the Guardian:
1 Rockferry - Duffy
2 Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends - Coldplay
3 Only by the Night - Kings of Leon
4 Good Girl Gone Bad - Rihanna
5 All the Right Reasons - Nickelback
6 Scouting for Girls - Scouting for Girls
7 Amy Winehouse - Back to Black: The Deluxe Edition
8 Leona Lewis - Spirit
Hmmmmm..could be worse, I suppose.
I presume that excludes compilations?
I think so, yes...
the article had a different list for compilations, although the entries seemed quite surprising to me..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/07/duffy-coldplay-kings-leon-ri...
Is that a problem?
I think that's fine. If herds of people want to give their money to musicians then as long as they don't make me listen to it then it's better than illegal downloads. I guess that the sort of person that would buy an Amy Whinehouse album isn't the sort of person that would give, say, Neko Case a chance so it's not as if the money would be better spent if those albums didn't exist.
Not a problem at all
If the average person buys just 8 CDs as noted above, I wondered which 8 that was most likely to be, that's all. As we've now established, most of us are not average.
Hmmm
And my 60 odd I bought in 2008 didn't include any of those..!!
Is that relative cost?
ie is the comparison one that accounts for inflation compared to 2000 or simply the average cost in today's money?
It would be interesting...
to learn what the average spend on music was in 2000.
No.2 Highest per capita
spend is Norway apparently which is strange because the one and only time I was there I couldnt find any music stores at all.
Buying
I reckon I buy about 30-40 CDs a year and download the odd track. Still buy vinyl and tapes too!
As a poor hard-dun-by student
I hardly spend any money on music whatsoever. Maybe the odd gig ticket here and there, but I don't think it reaches £67 a year.
Places like Myspace and Spotify mean that a necessity to hear music doesn't equal a necessity to buy it. So I spend my money on other things.
I'm becoming a parody of myself
I reckon - including downloads - I spend about £600-800 a year.
If I'm honest I reckon it breaksdown like this
20% of it is on heritage albums, most of which I rarely listen to;
20% on new albums by former favourites in the inevitably vain hope that they'll recapture former glories.
55% on things that have been well reviewed only to find that the rationale for said reviews escapes me,
Leaving only about 5% on good new albums which I find genuinely interesting.
What is it about getting old that makes it so difficult to engage with new music? It wasn't really all better back then was it? (I'm 42 if that helps).
Those former glories!!
I'm sure I could save myself a small fortune if I could convince myself that no matter what I hope, that new CD by X is just not going to be anything but a pale shadow at best of that favourite from N years ago.
Good Question!
It took me many years to realise that Lou Reed was never going to make another album I needed to hear twice, nor were the Rolling Stones, or Van Morrison. Even the Ramones, who I love dearly, made some not very good albums. (There, I've said it! I still bought the albums)
I remember reading a theory that people don't just buy albums - they buy the idea that they will have time to listen to the album, which is a different thing. In other threads here I've been reminded of how many times I listened to the first albums I bought, and now I have easily 100 CDs I haven't played twice.
It's partly me changing, partly the embarrassment of riches : shall I listen to an old Jimmy Reed album I know and love, or maybe Swordfishtrombones, or would I rather try to hear some "new"?
New v Old
New has got to be better than old surely? Things should continually be reinvented. Nostalgia notwithstanding, are there any other examples where old is definitively better than new. I'm struggling (medicine, housing, transport etc)
Isn't the best music always being made now? Are Joy Division really any better than Interpol? Was Carmel superior to Duffy? Does anyone need to hear The Beatles ever again?
The past is always better for one very simple reason
There's more of it.
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twice the average