Ongoing History Daily: Ripping every song ever recorded

Here are some fascinating numbers.  If you’re in your upper 20s and you’re an average sort of music fan, you’ve probably listened to about 800,000 songs.  That’s five full years of music.  I’m told this is typical for a 27- year-old, so if you want to know how much you specifically have listened to, pro-rate that number for your current age. 

Item number two: How many songs have been recorded since the beginning of recorded sound about 150 years ago?  The most current estimate is somewhere well beyond 4 billion.  If you were to convert them all to MP3, you’d need storage of over 160 petabytes of music.  For reference, Spotify and all the other streaming music services currently have libraries of just 95 million songs.

There’s a long way to go before we can access absolutely EVERYTHING.

Yesterday’s post dealt with the origin of the phrase “sex and drugs and rock’n’roll.”