30 Years Of Music Industry Upheaval In 30 Seconds

In 30 years, we've gone from flipping cassette tapes to playing CDs to downloading iTunes to streaming Spotify.

These seismic shifts in the music industry are visualized in a fascinating GIF, created by Paul Resnikoff, founder of Digital Music News, using sales data from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Part of the story here is the massive rise of the CD in the 1990's, which Resnikoff calls "one of the most successful formats ever witnessed" by the music industry.

CDs peaked in popularity in 2003, when they accounted for 95.5 percent of market share. By 2013, their share had been whittled down to just over 30 percent.

"What you're witnessing is not only a radical transformation from physical to digital ways of listening to music, but within digital, a huge and ongoing shift from downloads to streaming," Resnikoff told The Huffington Post in an email. "The recording remains more popular than ever, but they way recordings are being listened to is shifting very, very quickly.

In the late 2000's, we see the rapid explosion of digital media formats for listening to music, including downloads from sites like iTunes and streaming services like Spotify.

Resnikoff says that the same disruption that has affected music has also shaped the rest of the entertainment industry.

"Music is not in a bubble: in the past decade alone, the demographic that is typically most interested in music is also devouring TV, film, games, and, well -- the internet -- in massive quantities," Resnikoff said. "Sitting around, smoking weed and listening LPs is a quaint memory of a simpler time in entertainment media."

Looks like those soulful days of smoking joints and savoring vinyl have been replaced by selfies, Twitter metrics, and musical "arrows through the heart."

Chiquita Bananas Could Face Boycott Over Plan To Ditch America

Chiquita may be the next major corporation to split from the U.S. to avoid taxes.

The banana giant rejected a $625 million buyout bid by Brazilian orange behemoth Cutrale Group and conglomerate Safra Group on Thursday and said it means to go ahead with a planned merger with Irish rival Fyffes. The combined company is then expected to register in low-tax Ireland in what is known as a tax inversion -- essentially renouncing U.S. corporate citizenship.

“Chiquita remains committed to completing its transaction with Fyffes, which it believes will create a combined company that is better positioned to succeed in a highly competitive marketplace,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Chiquita, which is based in Charlotte, N.C., originally inked a deal to acquire Fyffes in March.

But a lot has changed since March, with such inversion deals increasingly facing public scorn. Inversions have lately become a political target of several high-ranking lawmakers in Congress. President Barack Obama has considered an executive order to close the tax loophole and said of the practice earlier this month that “it’s not right.”

And a week ago, boycott threats forced drugstore-chain operator Walgreen to abandon its plan to re-incorporate in Switzerland after merging with European competitor Alliance Boots in an inversion deal.

Chiquita could be the next company to face such a backlash, according to Roger Hickey, the co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive nonprofit that collected more than 300,000 signatures on a petition against Walgreen.

“There will be a strong reaction,” Hickey told The Huffington Post on Friday. “Chiquita brands is very, very well-known, and they could be vulnerable to a boycott as well.”

Unlike Walgreen, which stood to save $4 billion over the next five years, Chiquita has said it would receive little immediate benefit from its move to Ireland. But nonprofit tax groups told HuffPost they suspect long-term benefits are driving the inversion deal.

“Our sense is Chiquita is hiding something in the deal by not publicly acknowledging and not publicly stating what kind of advantage they’re getting from this,” Frank Clemente, the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, told HuffPost. “The reason we think they’re doing this is to avoid bad publicity.”

Ed Loyd, a spokesman for Chiquita, did not return a call requesting comment.

Chiquita also had about $1.7 billion in profits parked offshore last December, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last March. If it pledges allegiance to Ireland’s tricolored flag, it can avoid paying U.S. taxes on that money, Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel at Citizens for Tax Justice, told HuffPost.

“Instead, if they do the inversion transaction," she said, "over time, through fairly complicated legal and accounting maneuvers, they can move that money out of tax-haven subsidiaries to the new parent company and eventually get all of it.”