Music Sales Continue to Plummet for Albums and Digital Downloads

http://variety.com/2014/music/news/music-sales-fall-albums-digital-downloads-losses-1201257795/

by prostoalex • 12 years ago

41 47 12 years ago

dang• 12 years ago

Url changed from http://pando.com/2014/07/03/digital-music-sales-are-in-a-fre..., which points to this. HN prefers original sources.

prostoalex• 12 years ago

Thanks, I was wondering.

Zenst3• 12 years ago

YEs the whole media market appears to be transitioning from outright purchase towards a leasing model with the likes of Netflix and Spotify and others doing streaming of films and media.

This is not entirely unexpected given how cable operators operate TV packages, but it does open up for more competition and it is that competition that makes the private sector model work for the consumer.

This all said, I can often get a CD cheaper than the online equivalent, more so if a bit older and you shop about. Aspect of old stock taking up space does play more for the physical store offerings, unlike digital versions.

daveid2• 12 years ago

I hope it never actually transitions. I'm one of those people who still buy CDs; I want to own what I buy, not have it leased to me for a limited time. I love music and having my own library is cheaper in the long term than paying some monthly amount. Imo that only makes sense for people who jump from artist to artist on a daily basis.

endgame• 12 years ago

Same here. I want to be able to rip it to FLAC, archive the rips, convert it to Ogg Vorbis for my portable device and never have anyone take my music away from me because they revoked license keys, or the service died, or because I happen to be in Australia...

astrodust2• 12 years ago

I used to buy CDs for that reason, but the convenience of digital downloads has made it pretty much irrelevant.

$10 on iTunes vs. $18 in a store? iTunes it is.

In many cases the iTunes package is better, it includes music videos, a full brochure, commentary from the artist. None of this comes with the basic CD package, you'd have to pay even more.

macNchz• 12 years ago

Yeah I really value having a library of music that I've collected and curated over time. Being able to listen to this music whether or not the streaming service continues their contract with the record label, or if it decides to block me for whatever reason, is very important to me.

Very few of my friends share this feeling, which makes me concerned for the future of ownable music. On the other hand, I'm enjoying the rise in popularity of vinyl. I've been buying albums and downloading the digital copies that they come with—best of both worlds.

ternaryoperator• 12 years ago

Not only that, but the CDs are an automatic backup to the digital versions and they have a much higher bit rate. So I have the best possible sound on permanent media.

graylights2• 12 years ago

Often buying a physical CD on amazon (with included mp3) is significantly cheaper then buying just the mp3 album on amazon.

To me the shift away from purchasing music is because the constant availability of music. If I really want to hear that one old song, I can pull it up on youtube without having to build a library. My music tastes are easily satisfied with Creative Commons music or free streaming, even without subscribing. There is such a surplus of music available with how cheap it has gotten to produce. Music labels are in big trouble as they have to compete with hobbyists. They're being marginalized both in the production and distribution end.

But I don't see that same level of hobbyist quality TV. The business has changed a lot of TV, but only in distribution, not the production. Red vs Blue was a decade ago and little has built on that model since. Maybe Dr Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog could be considered a hobby project, but it was done by big name stars. The only real hobby video we have now is just game-streaming and sketch comedy skits.

hassy• 12 years ago

Personal anecdote - <2% of visitors that play a preview ever click on a buy link on http://wonderwheel.fm

It's something I built for myself and I didn't expect to make anything, but it's still been entertaining to have the expectation confirmed.

The site has seen some okay traffic but hasn't made enough to buy me a half of Tennent's.

Zigurd4• 12 years ago

A market for recorded performances is about 100 years old. It is a novelty in human culture as well as commerce. Cartels controlling this market are an even more recent and dubious "innovation."

Expecting them to have lifespan and protection of the property under one's house, or to even be analogous to that property, is delusional.

pessimizer• 12 years ago

What we need is more small scale live music. Every birthday party or romantic dinner should hire musicians. Recorded music will be a musician's calling card. People will again be primarily interested in local musicians, rather than specks in an arena 100 yards away from them. I'm happy this is happening.

That will disadvantage more produced, machine-assisted music that is hard to recreate live (or unconvincing when played at a moderate volume), but if there's anything the internet has taught me, it's that people will make that stuff for free, extremely well.

Nav_Panel• 12 years ago

I totally support this.

I'm doing a summer internship in San Francisco and one of my favorite parts of living here is being able to see fantastic local music in small venues. I've been going to a cafe in the Mission where I can just hang out after work and listen to a jazz group play from around 8:30 until midnight.

I noticed that as a result of seeing live music in my spare time, my consumption of recorded music has dropped dramatically. I pretty much only put on my headphones when I go for a run (I will occasionally listen to an album while I'm programming, but I prefer not to).

dharma13• 12 years ago

how is it different from say, a book?

graylights2• 12 years ago

Well plenty of books are the same. Meant to be consumed, used up and then just take space.

But a quality reference book doesn't really have an analogue in music. That book can be a key tool to someone performing their profession. This applies even in a digital medium.

Zigurd4• 12 years ago

That's the question, isn't it: Copyright became mainstream in the era of books, printed sheet music, and other publishable symbolic encoding of information. Performances were not protectable.

Why do you think a recorded performance of a work should be protectable under copyright? It's NOT an original work of the intellect. It's a performance of what is often someone else's work. Just because it is recorded, should it be protected? Does the technological innovation of recording make it protect-able? And, if so, shouldn't the technological innovation of infinite copies at zero marginal cost make performances un-protectable?

gcv2• 12 years ago

It probably doesn't matter to the artists, but I wonder how much of that business went to streaming services, and how much to BitTorrent?

grumpybaglady• 12 years ago

its tough to say, but i can't imagine there being a large increase in torrent downloads over the past year (not much, if anything there has changed), where as streaming services have become more accessible and common.

coldtea3• 12 years ago

There's this bizarro idea you get from a lot of people that torrents are not any threat to artists, because those people dowloading from torrents wouldn't have bought the record anyway. Not to mention it brings them "new fans" who discovered the record on the torrent.

In real life, of my 30+ friends, few and very rarely bother to buy anything from the artists the like anymore, they just torrent it. And they almost never see them in concert either -- since most rarely visit my country.

So a band that used to sell 100.000 and 300.000 records here (say U2), now sells around 10.000-20.000 or so (on a lucky day).

taeric2• 12 years ago

While I think some of the evidence in support of torrenting is more than a little suspicious, I do question whether or not heavily fighting it can provide value.

That is, I don't know how many folks that torrent stuff do buy stuff. Anecdotally, I actually just don't know that many folks that torrent. Of the few I suspect do torrent, they wouldn't be buying anything anyway. At worst, they would have been fine with crappy taped copies from the radio. Or music videos on VHS. (Heck, as a kid I probably watched more VHS stuff than anything else, and we bought videos.)

So, my hypothesis is that the amount of money and effort that is extracted from and goes into fighting music torrenting eclipses any supposed money that was lost in the crime.

I'm definitely game for any links. Or ideas on how to explore this hypothesis.

dobbsbob• 12 years ago

Somebody is seeing U2 in concert, they are making hundreds of millions per tour. Merch licensing is also huge income now compared to 20 years ago.

Music producers are also getting paid, Andy Samberg used to buy his SNL shorts music and Lonely Island beats from producers on twitter selling and leasing their songs directly.

kalleboo• 12 years ago

Among my friends, Spotify completely ended music piracy. Spotify is way more handy than finding torrents, downloading them, copying the MP3s to your phone, etc. I'm from Scandinavia though where Spotify started. TV and Movie piracy however is still widespread since there's no good way to watch that stuff easily and cheaply (Netflix has recently started in Sweden but the catalog is still very weak).

gcv2• 12 years ago

I remember reading recently that the pay-per-play model of reimbursing artists from streaming services barely pays for anything except substantial hit tracks. A lot of the stuff I listen to on Rdio has barely a couple of hundred plays. So for smaller artists, streaming might as well be torrenting: neither helps pay the bills. Track sales, whether digital or physical, at least stand a chance of bringing in a living. Judging by TFA, it looks like releasing vinyl records is the way to go, but serving the throwback collector and audiophile markets can't be lucrative, either.

yabatopia• 12 years ago

I don't think that the transition from physical to digital/streaming music is the only explanation. There's also plain simple demand and supply. There's never been so much music available as now. It's never been easier to create, publish and distribute music. The digital supply is just immense. The demand just can't follow.

pinaceae• 12 years ago

especially through youtube and the gratis availability of so much existing music you never heard of. just listening through the stuff created between 2000-2010 will take years. and then youtube carries all the older stuff.

add pandora, spotify, etc. and you don't need to purchase music, at all, anymore.

davidgerard3• 12 years ago

There is too much art, because former amateurs now have the tools to make something that's good enough to pass within their chosen splinter of culture. And give it away free. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe... Artists are now directly competing with their fans.

Or, more directly: I have a disk with literally terabytes of media on it. It is still more convenient for me to find stuff on YouTube and play it from there.

narrator• 12 years ago

Have you seen http://www.ektoplazm.com/ ? It's a free music label. There's no obvious monetization strategy and it's hundreds of albums worth of independently produced electronic music, some of it quite good, all available for download at full quality. Perhaps it's just so so cheap to produce music that people give it away for free? Maybe they just do it to get a higher profile, so they can get DJ gigs, or they just love the music?

davidgerard3• 12 years ago

Or indeed Jamendo or Bandcamp, where you can basically put your stuff up and get paid instead of hammered by bandwidth charges should you accidentally gain popularity.

People like making stuff and putting it up. Witness DeviantArt, which is >90% unspeakable shit the perpetrators of which should have their hands cut off to stop them abusing pencils ever again, with a small percentage of actually goddamn brilliant artists whose presence justifies the whole enterprise.

(COI: I'm shacked up with one of said decent artists.)

williamcotton• 12 years ago

I disagree. I think that the music isn't good enough and that's why no one is listening to it. I think that because the entire industry fell apart that the specialization that resulted in the great music of the past has been fractured.

The first main issue is that without an functioning ecosystem artists are forced to do everything themselves. When there were profits to be made off of recorded music all sorts of middle-men would take it upon themselves to make money for themselves while generating enough income for people to have music creation be a profession. These days you won't find as many band managers because there isn't very much in the way of profits. This goes for everything else in the ecosystem.

Part of this is due to losing the main way that musicians have profited, that is by selling records and by playing live music. Live music has been under assault since the beginning of the recorded music era. By the peak of the recording industry touring music was mainly looked at as a loss leader and were basically seen as just a way to drum up publicity for record sales. Most people did and continue to stay home and listen to recorded music instead of going to live music. At one point in the time the only way to hear music was by being around while it was performed.

The god's honest truth is that most intelligent and talented people are going in to other creative industries and contemporary music is suffering. I see more naturally talented musicians writing code than I see playing music and the main reason is because smart people won't work towards a career in an industry that is caught in a death spiral.

The tools aren't what matter. Music made with little training, experience, and passion is still shitty music even if it has sonic characteristics that were incredibly expensive just 20 years ago.

Good music is intelligent and aware of it's purpose. Good music is carefully constructed and performed with trained expression. Good music communicates intent and satisfies the needs of an audience.

The amateurs are not good enough for the public and so the public is ignoring them and instead listening to the professional music of the very recent past that still has a message and form that continues to make sense.

Pretty soon society will move far enough from this era that new stories and new modes of expression will be demanded and a new crop of artists will be happy to supply it. Hopefully a viable economic ecosystem will support their efforts.

davidgerard3• 12 years ago

I think you're thinking it's aesthetics that sells music first. It isn't - it's its value as a cultural token that sells it first. Aesthetics operates within there.

imchillyb• 12 years ago

People don't really want to own music. People want to listen to what they want, when they want.

If a company can provide that service, for a fee, that company will succeed.

The older and slower to move companies, will not understand. Those old and slow to act companies will fail.

People don't want to own music. People want to listen to music.

coldtea3• 12 years ago

People don't really want to own music. People want to listen to what they want, when they want.

Actually music fans used to want to own their music -- and took pride in their collections.

The current decline is a combination of two things:

1) for the younger generations music (pop/rock/whatever) is not as important as it was up until the eighties and slightly into the nineties.

Pop/Rock music thrived in an era when it was a major escape into a fantasy world. Nowadays there are 100 other diversions, from video games, to YouTube, to 9gag, to anime, 200 tv series, etc etc.

2) the remaining (but not that culturally important anymore) music fans, can listen to anything they want in several different ways, none of which involves paying for the music ("radio" streaming, youtube, torrents, etc).

(Btw, "concerts" and "merchandise" is not the answer for musicians. Band merchanidise is a non-musical gimmick for teenagers and immature 20-somethings, and concerts were traditionally a loss-leader for album sales, except for bigger bands. Plus concert attendance is even on the decline on the younger demographics).

If a company can provide that service, for a fee, that company will succeed.

Bah,, it will just be a company with razor-thin margins in a declining market. They might make some profit, but they wont "succeed" the way music industry of the past had, especially when it starts charging a fee. With ads they might do better, but still not that great.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

> People don't really want to own music. People want to listen to what they want, when they want.
Actually music fans used to want to own their music -- and took pride in their collections.

It used to be that owning your own music was the only way to listen to what you want, when you want, since if you didn't own it, you couldn't play it on demand.

Now, those two things are separate, and the demand for ownership has dropped. That may be a change in desire for ownership or other priority changes of the type you suggest, but the simpler explanation is that the ownership wasn't desired as an end in itself, it was desired as a means to the end of listening to what you want, when you want, and when the available means to acheive that changed, the desire for ownership of music was reduced because there were now alternative means to the ends.

nickonline• 12 years ago

I think part of it is also portability. In the 80's, 90's and even into the early 00's it didn't matter whether you were listening to the music at home or on the move, you still needed your tape or CD, even into the 00's you carried around a limited MP3 collection. You were limited by the physical media that carried the albums.

by around 2010 I had TB of music and it's just not practical to carry that around. However with 3G/4G I can access almost any song I want via Spotify without ads and without sacrificing any space on my device. Just for paying a small fee each month.

I still pay for my music, but I don't own anything anymore.

bhewes• 12 years ago

I don't see how market movements of -13%(digital) and -15%(albums) equal a plummet.

Music Sales Continue to Plummet for Albums and Digital Downloads

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