Stat of the Day
"...During the second half of 2004, more than 91 million digital tracks -- songs downloaded from the Internet -- were sold, compared with 19.2 million in the same period in 2003. That's an increase of 376 percent."
From this Post article, which argues that physical formats have no future in media - 'no format'. OK, a few things to note:
1) Digital media is not 'no format'. MP3, Ogg, etc,
are 'formats', just like Redbook (which is what's on the CD's you buy).
2) I don't think physical media have no future. I think the labels are going to try some fairly interesting strategies based around new kinds of physical delivary mechanisms fairly soon, as the economics of chip-based rights management and memory become commodity economics.
3) One could also make an argument that physical formats will simply move up the consumption chain to higher value media (viz Blu Ray etc).