Phasing out of Compact Disc

CD sales peaked at about a billion units in 2000. The last data I saw (2013) showed that it was the latest of a dozen straight years of declining sales, bottoming out at +/- 200 million units. Since 2010, the avg annual decline has been small, so it appears that CD sales aren't really being "phased out", they're just slowly dying off. At what point do "major labels" stop releasing CDs altogether? Does it matter? It's pretty clearly a dying format.

I don't have data from the 1960's, but, by comparison, in the '70s, LP sales peaked at +/- 200 million units. Obviously, that was a smaller (unit) market for recorded music than we have today. Contrary to what many here seem to believe, however, the LP was not "killed off" by CD, it was killed off by cassettes, which displaced LP sales at basically a 1 for 1 rate up to 1985. Then CD joined the party and LPs essentially disappeared as a meaningful piece of the market.

As a practical matter, LP is still dead. Unit sales might make up 1% of the market and dollar sales might be 1.5 to 2%.

Ivan,

I don't know the contractual dynamics behind the decisions to shut LP production facilities in 1982/1983, but I do know that LP sales had been essentially flat for a decade by that time. Over the course of that same 10 year period, cassette sales went from less than 10% of the market to more than 50% of the market (units sold, long play capacity). Given the pending introduction of another "playback only" format (cd), it's easy to see why the record companies would shift resources to CD production. The opportunity to resell the catalog in the new format was surely compelling, but it doesn't change the fact that LP sales were long stagnant when the changeover occurred and that cassette sales were growing rapidly. I'd still characterize the dynamic as cassettes killing LP and CD killing cassettes (especially once CD gained usable recording capability in the early 1990s).