Between the late 1990s and the first decade of the following century, the global music industry found itself in the midst of a seismic shift: suddenly, the sales of CDs dropped. From 2000 onward, the global recorded-music market lost about 40% of its value over 14 years. Unauthorized file-sharing spread,recorded-music revenues fell sharply. Did young people abandon music listening? Didn’t they love music altogether anymore?
Actually, young people would not stop loving music. They still consumed enormous amounts of it, but more and more often expected instant, cheap, portable, and often “free” access rather than buying physical albums. Online services like Napster and later peer-to-peer file sharing, MP3 downloads were changing consumer routines and disrupting the old business model. People were not interested in owning the music “medium”–the Lp, the CD–because they could listen to their favorite music simply online any time they would or could. What the music industry initially interpreted as a demand crisis, in reality, was also a distribution and business model crisis.
Does this sound familiar? Yuri Zambon, Vivai Cooperativi Rauscedo technical sales director cited this example of an “industry “crisis” during “Radici Comuni, Sfide Nuove” (“Common Roots, New Challenges”), an interesting conference held recently in Friuli, in the town of S. Giorgio di Richinvelda. The occasion was the 75th anniversary of the Rauscedo Cooperative Winery, the region’s leading producer of white wines. Zambon stated that the wine industry is currently experiencing something similar. It is commonly believed that people—especially young people—no longer want to drink wine, when in reality the way it is consumed has changed.
This is true: both industries–music and wine - faced falling sales and initially mistook a change in consumer behavior for a loss of interest.
In music, people did not stop engaging with music; they stopped accepting the old format and price model. CDs and downloads were soon replaced by on-demand access, playlists, and subscription services.
Wine is undergoing a comparable format-and-occasion shift. Younger consumers are not rejecting taste, conviviality, or quality altogether, but many are drinking less often, drinking less alcohol choosing lower-alcohol or no-alcohol alternatives, and distributing their “drinking occasions” across cocktails, craft beer, spirits, and non-alcoholic drinks.
Sadly, the comparison between the two industries stops here. Unlike the one the music industry faced back then, wine’s crisis is more complex because it involves health, demographics, climate, oversupply, and the physical nature of an agricultural product. It is not merely a new distribution technology.
Music is infinitely reproducible and can be delivered instantly at near-zero marginal cost. Wine is an agricultural product, vintage-specific, geographically rooted, perishable, and constrained by vineyards, appellations, and climate. That makes the wine crisis harder to solve through a technological platform alone.
Furthermore, wine faces a cultural headwind that music did not: growing health consciousness and alcohol moderation. This is not just a distribution problem; it affects the core product itself.
However, there is at least one lesson from music the wine world can learn from this: do not defend the old format, defend the underlying experience. Music survived by recognizing that people wanted access, discovery, personalization, and shareability, not physical objects.
Similarly, people may still want pleasure, identity, conviviality, terroir, discovery, and stories...but not necessarily in the same quantity, format, price bracket, or drinking occasion as before.
The industry’s challenge is therefore not only to “make young people drink more wine,” but to make wine relevant within new patterns of moderate, selective, experience-led consumption.
And perhaps it should also be more attuned to people’s preferences rather than rigidly adhering to production regulations that no longer reflect the climatic conditions of the regions. Unfortunately, Nature is changing the rules of the game faster than humans can adapt to them.