Music Industry Bellwether: Dark Side of The Moon

What do increased sales of Dark Side of The Moon tell us?

Pink Floyd’s 1973 album has become the unofficial metric by which one measures a new audio format’s likely takeup, as there’s an apparently insatiable supply of people ready to buy and re-buy it whenever it is re-issued. According to the band’s site (tinyurl.com/d4ua7), the album “has sold approximately 34m copies worldwide”. Though to say that is to skim over the fact that it remained in the US top 100 for 1,558 weeks – just two weeks short of three decades. All of which led Bill Bumgarner, a developer for Apple, to remark that “Dark Side of the Moon is the porn of audio media“. Why? Because “if porn embraces a video format, it’ll be a success. Likewise, if DSotM dominates your audio media sales, [it’s a] definite success indicator…”