Estimate how much space would be needed to store digitally one copy of all the m

Question

Estimate how much space would be needed to store digitally one copy of all the music ever recorded. State and justify any assumptions you make, and show how you worked out your answer. (Hint: you could start by finding information about the size of online music databases). Compare the result you got with the amount of storage available nowadays on a smartphone or tablet, and discuss whether sometime in the future (given likely improvements in technology) people will be able to store all the music ever recorded on the personal computing devices that will be available then.

Explanation / Answer

There are at least 97 million songs. Of course, I’m sure these are only the songs officially released. If we included songs everyone knows or the incredibly old Celtic songs with no names, I’m sure we would reach 200 million songs

If we also add all form of music in the list, according to research we have 623,162,727 music as of May 2011 and a music is added every 2 min, therefore present count could be around 624,739,527 music.

avg size of a MP3 is 3.5MB (from a file hosting service provider)

therefore we need 2,186,588,344 MB or 2,135,340GB or 2085TB of data

Not sure if in near future it is possible or not, but once we start storing data in DNA, we can easily store all songs in handheld device.

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