Record Industry Notes First Increase in Overall Sales Since 1999

[N_Singh]

http://allthingsd.com/20130226/for-t...s-are-growing/


From the article:

"Digital sales are increasing fast enough to outpace the decline in physical. Last year, digital grew 9 percent and accounted for 34 percent of revenue"


citing another report, a Mac-based website noted the following:

"The report from IFPI comes just as research firm NPD notes that music file sharing in the U.S. fell sharply in 2012 as customers continue to embrace alternatives such as free streaming services from the likes of Pandora and Spotify. According to the report, the number of peer-to-peer (P2P) music download users fell by 17% last year to account for 11% of Internet users, down from 20% seven years earlier.
The volume of illegally downloaded music files from P2P services also declined 26 percent, compared to the previous year; however P2P wasn’t the only sharing activity to shrink. Music files burned and ripped from CDs owned by friends and family fell 44 percent, the number of files swapped from hard drives dropped 25 percent, and the volume of music downloads from digital lockers decreased 28 percent."

[Yodelgoat]

Ok everybody back into the pool! Good times are here again. We can all just relax now. The problem is fixed.

[jefftiger]

These numbers seem remarkably precise for activities that can't be directly measured (e.g., burning CDs owned by family and friends). How does one measure this? Do they base these decreases on some sort of survey that they've conducted. Are people going to honestly answer a question like "Did you steal music purchased by your friends"? It sounds very anecdotal.

[FrippWire]

So physical sales still account for roughly 66% of the overall business and we keep hearing about the end of CD's? Spare me. The music industry has no idea how to make up for the loss of physical sales. CD's are not going bye-bye anytime soon. Glad to see an overall increase in music sales. That indicates more people are paying for their music.

[Esoteric]

Ok guys--heres an update from the horses mouth as Ive just seen a recent sales statement for our last quarter of the year.

Where there is a massive increase is paid for streaming services, particularly with new albums. No denying it, the figures are a lot more than I thought (first time its been on the statement for me to see) the amounts individually are miniscule though, so for artists this is not a life changing thing and certainly wont assist in the loss of some physical sales, for anyone with a lot of catalogue though the tiny amounts can add up to not quite such tiny amounts--and hence I can see for the bigger labels would certainly make quite a difference and Im sure this is why sales are showing as "up". Paid for album downloads too are not insignificant and certainly way better for the artist than streaming but what is very notable on my statement with both the legal streaming and legal downloads is that a lot of this is happening from countries we wouldnt sell physical to anyway because of problems in getting paid, Brazil, Phillipines, mexico, Russia, etc--and a lot in the USA too--not so much in the UK and Europe, so in some ways it appears to be a good add on--rather than a huge loss in sales and at a price that these guys can cope with rather than expensive shipping.

[JJ88]

So physical sales still account for roughly 66% of the overall business and we keep hearing about the end of CD's? Spare me. The music industry has no idea how to make up for the loss of physical sales. CD's are not going bye-bye anytime soon. Glad to see an overall increase in music sales. That indicates more people are paying for their music.

Yeah, it's all a lot of crap. Some in the industry probably want to phase out the CD because it's less effort to focus on downloads, but they'd be insane to do so.

[Esoteric]

Yeah, it's all a lot of crap. Some in the industry probably want to phase out the CD because it's less effort to focus on downloads, but they'd be insane to do so.

more margin, less staff-- to be honest--I think many of the very big labels where the beancounter rules the roost feel this way unfortunately. In pre 1990 catalogue as well ------physical sales are much higher than even this 66%--I think digital accounts for about about 9%.--problem is those of us at the non fashionable end of the business dont usually get asked.