Earth Info

I wanted to know how much disk space all the music ever released would take up and couldnt find an approximation, so I put together this to give me a ball park figure.

If you add up all the abums on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Albums_by_year

It gives 81,708

At around 4mb per track and 10 tracks per album thats

81708*4MBytes*10 = 3268320 MBytes

3268320 MBytes = 3191GBytes = 3.2TBytes

Which is around 3.2Tbytes,

2TB Single SATA Drives are already available in bulk and so we are nearly into the realm of the carrying ‘all’ the music on a single drive.

However, the wiki figure of 81,708  is of course  not everything

http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2008/09/biggest-record-collection-in-the-world-paul-mawhinney/

Lists 6million tracks, spotify claims  4.5Million.

This works out at about 22TB, and 17.5TB for spotify.

Which is still around 10 drives or less worth of data, its amazing to think that quite soon we will be able to carry all the music ever recorded on a single drive… sort of blows the file sharing problem out of the water, when people can simply swap “all” the music with a friend.

[Estimates done September 2009]