The Shape of Recorded Music

Plot every dated recording in MusicBrainz by year and you get the closest thing music history has to a seismograph. A century of economics, war, technology, and one pandemic, in a single curve:

Read it like a core sample, left to right:

• 1930–1932: the cliff. Recording output falls 51% in two years. The Depression nearly killed the record industry — in the US, unit sales famously fell over 90% — and the world's most complete music database still carries the wound as a notch.
• 1943: the strike. The American Federation of Musicians banned commercial recording from mid-1942; the trough (945 recordings, back to 1927 levels) is a labor dispute preserved in amber. The same event bends the song-length chart.
• 1955: liftoff. Output quadruples in four years — cheap 45s, tape replacing lacquer, rock and roll giving teenagers a reason. The curve never looks back.
• 1987: the CD bend. The steepest sustained climb on the chart, 1987–1995, is the CD era — every catalog reissued, every album 74 minutes, every band's vault opened.
• 2020: the spike. Recordings rose 6% in the year concerts died — 1.32 million, the biggest year in history — then eased. Everyone went home, opened a laptop, and the laptop was a studio.

The area under the curve is the punchline: half of everything ever recorded, by this accounting, was recorded after 2011. Recorded music is not a library with a modern annex; it is a modern building with a small historical plaque in the lobby. (Honesty note: the curve measures what was recorded and survived into the database, which overweights the present — 2.98 million recordings carry no date at all, most of them old. History is dimmer than the chart, but not by enough to flatten it.)

Method: recording first-release-based dates per year, 1925–2025, log scale; 2026 omitted as partial. 39.6M recordings total, 2.98M undated. Computed August 2026 against the 2026-07-25 build.