VERY interesting!

Wow, I'm surprised CDs are still 50% of the market.

I was surprised to see a cassette being played in a car in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which was released in 2004. Thought that was a bit late for cassettes to be played in cars, but I could be wrong.

No - the first vehicle I had w/o a cassette player (well, once I had a cassette player) was a 2005. It wasn't until 2009 that we didn't have a vehicle w/a cassette player. And it wasn't until this year that I started going through the cassettes I recorded for the car to get rid of them.

I had a car with a cassette player that year.

Yeah, I guess I was wrong, after all. And I guess cars were the last place where cassettes had a finger-hold on the market? Though, according to that graphic, the market share of cassettes was down to 0% in 2006. Interesting.

I doubt many new cars had cassette players at that time, but there were still tons of older cars on the road that did have them. My car at the time was a '93, I think.

I think cassettes went to 0% because record companies decided to stop making them. Sorta like how they don't really release things on VHS anymore.

You don't know me very well, do you?

Surely you can't be more than 40% of the market!

Yesterday, I was surprised to see VCR head cleaners sold in a Rite Aid.

Yeah but the other guys here in ICE account for the rest.

That sounds logical!

When I got my truck in 2001 it was new with a cassette deck. I had stopped buying cassette tapes at least 10 years before that. I drove that truck for 11 years but only played tapes in it a few times. I had one of those converters that lets you play a CD player through your tape deck, then when I got XM radio I used a converter for it too.

My 2002 Subaru did not have a cassette deck, but they were still available as an option. I decided to cut the cord and move to CD only at that point, and got rid of my old cassettes after replacing the ones I really wanted with CD's. Since the advent of digital music I've made a mission to reacquire even the stuff I decided I didn't really want back then.

Interesting. I don't remember when they started putting CD players in cars. Was it really that long ago?

I'd love to see this graphic as a series of graphics so that I could really focus on individual measures. This GIF changes too quickly for me.

You can save it and see the individual "slides" in most graphics programs.

I'm sure it was an upgrade option but one that I couldn't afford at the time. I don't know when they started coming standard.

I seem to recall that car stereos were the last cassette stronghold, not so much for music, but for audiobooks. (Listening to audiobooks on CD is a pain in the ass, in that unlike cassettes, it can be difficult to bookmark a CD.)

Car CD players began in the early 90's, but I believe that they took a while to catch on because it took a few tries before somebody was able to successfully design a CD player that wouldn't skip every time the car hit a bump in the road.

Yeah, I remember the skips at least as far back as 1998. That's why the cassette adapters were useful.

They're not cool anymore, so we only hear stories about how the CD is dying, but what's discussed on the ICE boards is actually the dominant part of the market, still.

Vinyl is cool now, but in commercial terms its comeback has been barely a blip.

Most of the digital market is single track purchases.

Maybe streaming will wipe all the others away eventually, but it's not going to happen this year.