During April Blue Coast Music and DSD-Guide conducted a joint survey using their readers (now numbering 32,000) to find out what and how they were listening to music.
So far these are the results in. Keep in mind that these are our readers and don't reflect the general population. Still, we feel these results are valid within our community of active music lovers. We had hundreds of people take the survey. For reporting, we are using 100 as the base number ... for example... 86 out of 100 people download music in high resolution.
Question - What format do you listen to?
86/100 - High Resolution Downloads
77/100 - CDs
70/100 - SACD
58/100 - Vinyl
56/100 - Low res streaming and MQA
12/100 - Tape
There were many write-ins for DVD-Audio, Ripped CDs, Blu-Ray, etc. We would expect our readers to advocate high resolution downloads, but were surprised by the number of people buying CDs and SACDs.
This isn't surprising if you consider that independent labels (25% of the music purchased) lists 37% buying physicals products -- like CDs and vinyl. We got our numbers from the latest IFPI report on global sales for 2017. Sadly, I don't think high resolution downloads make a dent in global sales, but we hope one day that will change.
