http://www.ifpi.org/news/IFPI-GLOBAL-MUSIC-REPORT-2016

"Digital sales contribute 45 per cent of industry revenues; overtake physical's 39 per cent share"

But revenue is higher on digital sales than physical, so its basically 50/50... and that was last year... in 2016.

Alot of people still buy albums, even in this digital age.

The music industry is making more and more money off of streaming too I believe, because many people would rather pay for a service to listen to music or put up with ads to do so than they would buying each album individually.

I wasn't being literal when I said no one buys albums anymore, c'mon.

The fact is sales are down by a considerable amount comapred to 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. Digital sales are also falling due to streaming, this has been going on for the past couple years as Apple Music/Spotify become the go to place to consume music.

In 20 years this what the gaming industry will look like, streaming. 

I agree, that's an excellent way to preserve stuff. In this case, it's not nearly as good as preserving the originals, I think, but it's a lot better than preserving nothing.

It's a valid argument, just not one most people probably think of when talking about emulation. Most people are probably simply interested in playing the games. Thus, if those people preserve anything, it'll be the games they're interested in and not some obscure titles no one ever liked. I think that also explains why there aren't any threads about emulating those obscure games (along with the fact that no one would reply in those threads). Additionally, preservation is probably a long-term goal that doesn't have much relevancy to most people right now.

As to why people are so keen to mention preservation in threads about emulation, I'm not entirely sure. I suspect it's mainly a combination of hypocrisy (i.e. wanting to defend emulation and finding preservation to be a suitable tool for that) and long-term thinking (i.e. thinking preservation is a valuable thing itself in the long term, even though it's not exactly relevant right now).

So many ways to have the same argument over and over again.

Trends come and go in spite of popularity ... 

Preservation is arguably for older demographics who want to experience content in the past that is nearly lost and I imagine unpopular games still have such audience too ... 

I'm saying that moving towards streaming was a better idea than trying to stick with album sales when they were dwindling further and further.

Man, it's insane how much bigger CD sales were than vinyl. Do you know if there's an equivalent graph for video games?

Emulation is cool, it allows old games to be played in modern hardware, allowing people to discovers games of the past. Or even keep those games alive. Does it hurts sales? Nope, I think it might even help sales. As some old ips can be known by more people thanks to emulation. On top of that this helps to keep a pressure downwards on those eBay crazy prices.

Actually, maybe that's the reason why I support emulation. I want everyone else to be using ROMs and ISOs so that the actual copies will be cheaper for me