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CD Players outsold fourfold by MP3

Research conducted by GfK NOP, a leader in market search and consumer insight, has shown a huge increase in the sale of Mp3 players. Over thirty two million units were sold during 2007, which represents a four to one sales ratio over CD players.

The only note of caution, seventy five per cent of the Mp3 players recorded were integrated into mobile phones. Therefore, many people may not class this as a sale of an Mp3 player.

GfK NOP recorded the sales of dedicated Mp3 players at just eight million units, which would be an equal ratio against the eight million sales of CD players. But, this huge leap in sales of Mp3 players does astound those who record the sales figures of new media formats.

When either Cassette, CD, DVD, or Vinyl were released, none of these formats caught the imagination of the general public like Mp3 has. Without a doubt, Mp3 is the fastest selling music format ever recorded by market research institutions.

Even if the numbers could be construed as misleading, it's obviously an important development that the manufacturers of cell phones have implemented Mp3 into their handsets.

Just like with DVD or Bluray, a media formats stands or falls by it's endorsements. If it has a strong cross section of support from, users, publishers and hardware manufacturers, then it has a excellent chance of success. It now looks like Mp3 has this support.

To begin with file sharing users made the format popular, then the music industry slowly began to embrace it, and finally a large percentage hardware manufacturers have introduced it into their media players.

The key to Mp3's success over CD's is portability. Just like vinyl became too bulky in comparison to CD's, it's true to say CD's are far too bulky in comparison to Mp3. Mp3 files are stored on a hard drive, and a hard drive can store thousands of songs, and is dimensionally smaller in length and width to a compact disc.

It therefore comes as no surprise that all manufacturer's of portable media devices have embraced Mp3. But, this is still not the case with home Hi-fi systems. The standard Mp3 formats use compression to make the file smaller than that found on CD's.

The problem is that the compression distorts and lowers the quality of the music. Therefore, it's doubtful Mp3 will transplant CD's from a home Hi-fi system. Either the quality of Mp3 will need to be improved, or another digital file compression will along to better it.