...I'm surprised that "income from fatuous lawsuits against grannies who might have been torrenting" isn't shown.

EDIT - The linked article is well worth your time.

... record shops are closing. $15 per person spent on CDs?! And that was 2 years ago!
I thought it was more interesting to see that after 1973, the income from cassettes was always greater than for vinyl. Was that because they were overpriced or because they actually sold more cassettes on the US? Over here, although I knew people with some cassettes, nobody had a bigger cassette collection than vinyl collection.
It's also interesting to see that people seem to value convenience with the decline in cassette sales being mirrored by a rise in CD sales in the 80's and 90's. If the industry had this information at the birth of the world wide web, why didn't it realise that downloads would take off especially as they had a few years to think about it.

Something we didn't really have in blighty.

in digital sales over the past few years is probably the most worrying thing for the Music Industry.

profoundly backs up the theory, expounded here and elsewhere, that music in that decade was, broadly speaking, utter pants.

is who on earth was still buying recorded music on cassette in 2002?

I suspect that, if this is right, most of the sales were in the US equivalent of Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

CD sales seem to peak when I was 18. That explains so much...

it looks like an Andy Warhol print of the Canadian Rockies :-)