Friday, March 23, 2007

Album Sales Continue Downward Spiral

I still believe that the ability for a consumer to buy one song instead of an album, takes a bigger chunk out of revenue than piracy or pear-to-peer song sharing. But, that's just me. And I don't have any statistical data to back that up. Pollstar has the lowdown on album sales so far this year:

"While overall music sales are up 19 percent compared to last year at this time, translating into 46 million additional music purchases, sales of physical CDs have dropped 20 percent compared to 2006.

"So far this year, consumers have purchased 89 million physical CDs. That's 23 million fewer than the 112 million music fans bought last year.

"'And while digital album sales increased 100 percent over last year, overall album purchases, including 'track equivalent albums,' where 10 digital track purchases count as one album sale, dropped 10 percent to 118 million from last year's 131 million benchmark.

"Of course, piracy is still a factor in declining music sales. Despite the recording industry's efforts, peer-to-peer song sharing refuses to go away. Chances are you can find anything you want if you look hard enough. And, in most cases, you don't have to look very hard."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This arguement is so old now. Vinyl sales have fallen off too.

It is not the consumer's fault the record/cd industry's business model depends a handful of musicans to fuel billions in revenue. Reality is that Brittney or Nickelback weren't in the top 50 on P2P networks.

None of the top 20 were from RIAA represented music. Does it make a difference that independent music sales more than make up for any loss the RIAA claims?

Of course not.