This is a simple post about building the right perspective on sizes of different industries.

I was listening to one of favorite supply chain management podcasts “Freightvine“, hosted by Dr. Chris Caplice at MIT, where he mentioned an interesting fact that the trucking industry is about 10 times larger than the music industry, which we all think is already pretty big.

We all listen to music and watch videos, so it is reasonable to think that the music industry or the movie industry should be quite large.

Most of us in the United States drive every day, but we do not really think how large the transportation industry is.

Well, it turns out that the transportation industry is SO much larger than the music or movie industry. We need to be careful in what measure we use, though. So let’s take a quick look.

The GDP Measurement has many flaws, but it is the most widely used. Here is a quick introduction by Sal Kahn:

First, let’s look at the big picture from share of GDP by industry (USA 2023):

Statistic: Share of value added to the gross domestic product of the United States in 2023, by industry | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista

On first look, the transportation industry is a little behind the “arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation, and food services” industry. But the latter encompasses a lot of different services, with music or movie being a small part of it. But how small?

According to Statistica, the total music industry revenue in the US was about $11.45 billion in the US (link) in 2022. The North America film industry generated about $7.5 billion in 2022 (link).

Now, how large can the transportaion industry be, you might ask?

According to US Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics, transportation’s total contribution to U.S. GDP was $1,747.1 billion in 2022 (link).  So, a 100X difference there, even if we combine music and movie together.

If we further drill down to just focus on the trucking industry, we can see that it is about $600 Billion. So a 30X difference.

Now, going back to the original question – Why do the music and the movie industry loom so large in people’s mind? It is probably the mind share, in my, hum, mind. Music or video is just so important in people’s conscience, and that there are so many choices that we think about what song to listen or which video to watch every day. On the contrary, we rarely think about where the things we consume every day come from (answer: mostly delivered by a truck), or even think about the cars we are driving -unless something is wrong.