Remember the days when everybody walked around with bulky Walkmans? The ones where you had to insert CD’s to hear your favourite tunes? Even the original iPod mini’s felt like the dinosaur age for the music scene, yet it was only 2005 when they were released.

Yep, music has come a long way in the last decade. Back in our day, you had to carry separate devices if you wanted to listen to music AND if you wanted to contact your friends throughout the day (mainly a phone and a walkman/MP3 player). Since the Smartphone has been introduced, in particular, the iPhone, you can do everything in one console: make phone calls, video chats, play games, listen to music, and access the Internet. Heck, you can even do your daily workout through several apps available through the Smartphone.

Music downloads and purchases, in particular, have been revolutionized to Smartphones. We’ve gone from buying actual CD albums to downloading albums with a click of a button on our phones. We’ve said goodbye to our CD collections and welcomed digital playlists. You would think this would have created a huge demise for music sales, on the contrary, it has for album sales but sales through music downloads (mainly through iTunes) has never been stronger. Between 2005 and 2010, when many people converted from MP3 players to Smartphones, the amount of music units sold skyrocketed from 45 million to a whopping 130 million in just 5 years! Music has come a long way within the last decade and thanks to the Smartphone, music and communication within one device is a match made in heaven—the statistics in music downloads speaks for itself!

Source via Fortune Magazine (April 2013)