M is for Musical Format

When I was a teenager buying music, the LP, the long-playing album played at 33 revolutions per minute, was the dominant recording format in the United States and elsewhere. Then the CD, the shiny disc, was introduced in the 1980s, and by the end of that decade, the compact disc had supplanted the LP as the dominant musical form. CD sales peaked in 2000 with 942.5 million units sold in the US, but has begun a steady decline in the 21st century, losing out to digital sales.

It has been predicted that digital music sales will surpass CDs in 2012, although even digital sales in the US were flat in 2010, possibly because of economic unease.

But here’s the odd phenomenon