How Much Do You Spend On Recorded Music?

Last year on Breaking More Waves we conducted a project to record exactly (down to the penny) how much we spent on live music; not only the amount we paid for tickets, but associated costs such as travel, drinks, merchandise and accommodation. (You can find it here). The project was well received and so for 2015 we thought we’d try something similar and document everything we spend on recorded music. 

What we’re interested in is not just the amount, but the forms we consume music in and where we purchase from. Are we the great saviour of independent record shops, an iTunes whore or has Spotify killed our music purchasing dead? Is it all just stream, stream, stream? Or is there just so much free music out there that we don’t need to spend at all? What do you spend on music a month? Do you believe it is important to part with cash for music or do you think it no longer has any value in the recorded form?

With the live music project we provided a monthly report, however, for this project we’ll be posting a little more intermittently, with maybe 4 or 5 blog posts during the course of the year.

We’re really not sure what we’ll find out or conclude at this stage, but here are the statistics taken from our lovingly created spreadsheet as we near the end of the first month. The data is for up to midnight on the 28th January (see also the notes at the bottom of this post).

Recorded Music Spend 2015

Number of LPs purchased:  5

Number of EPs purchased: 3

Number of singles purchased: 0

Total % spend on formats

Where the money was spent 

As you can see in January we haven't spent a penny in record stores, all of our spending has been on line, most of it with Amazon. 

Some music nerds might suggest that buying from Amazon and not from an independent record store somehow makes us less of a 'true music fan', there's an implied lack of effort from just buying from Amazon as well as the moral issue of supporting your local business or a global one. On the other hand we could argue that spending £15 on vinyl LP a month from an indie store makes you less of a music fan than someone who buys multiple records and spends a vast amount more in doing so from Amazon. We'll leave that debate for you to ponder on - maybe that debate is a pointless one anyway? Does anyone care how big a fan you are? 

As far as what retailers we've used, we suspect that as the year goes on this will change, but it will be interesting to see what the final split on spending is and what our underlying reasons for choosing that method of purchase are. 

And now the all important figure..... 

The total spend for January 2015 was £85.76

We'd be interested to hear roughly how much you spend, what format you choose and where you buy your music from. Feel free to comment below, or as seems to be the preferred method these days, let us know on Twitter.

Notes (for those of you like us who like to know the geeky detail)

*We’ve included records that we’ve pre-ordered this month, even if they’ve yet to be received or released.

**Where a record comes in a bundled package such as CD + Download or Vinyl + Download we’ve counted the physical item rather than the download.

*** Where ordering online (in this case all purchases) we’ve included the cost of postage and packing.