How large would the worlds music collection be?

Question

Audio recordings are a recent medium in our history. With ever increasing storage space for portable audio devices, and people's growing audio libraries, how much space would be needed for a library of every single album recorded (assuming songs were converted to mp3 format around 5MB each).

Answer 1

It probably belongs to the Ertegun brothers, who had thousands of LPs
as teens.

Answer 2

Well, Wikipedia says Discogs lists 150,000,000 songs. Let's add 50,000,000 to it. So, 5 MB each, it would be "just" 1000 TB. I think it's not too much. With the new 8TB external hard drives (there might be cheaper too), it would cost £ 24,000, 33,000 € or 36,000 $. There is anyway even better storage options, I guess. Anyway, that wouldn't take very much space. Also, of course there are much more song on in the world, many of them never recorded. And even in that Discogs number, there are duplication, singles, collections, live versions etc. Gracenote has more albums listed, 8,000,000. Discogs has only 6,000,000. But then again, Spotify has 4,200,000, which is weird, because I don't find much of the music from there; you would suppose that that number would cover almost every somehow important albums. So, the thing is that those catalogs are usually missing something. So a better number would perhaps be 20,000,000 albums. Of course some very rare ones could be missing, and the number could go up much more. Anyway, average song amount on an album is somewhere near 10. So even with that approach, we would get 200 million songs. Then again, for example million songs could be considered as somehow essential, which is quite much. If you wanted to have a shuffle "radio" station where's there's every song you somehow like, if you have wide taste, something like 2,000,000 songs would be good. You would fit that 10 TB almost into one of those new HDDs. And BTW, my average file size is 6,6 MB, but I mostly listen to prog, so the songs are long, thus the bigger filesize. And I don't use full 320 kbps preferrably, but neither 128 kbps, but let's say on average, 200 kbps, and as VBR, it should be totally fine for listening; no one could see a difference. But for archiving (for example future humans might be aliens, and for converting), bigger kbps could be better.

Answer 3

I do not know, my Qauestion how much would it cost?