2008: The Worst Year for Music Industry Yet

[Bellamy]

2008: The Worst Year for Music Industry Yet

 

Poor music sales blamed on pirates and video games

 

Music fans have gone digital in a big way. It used to be that a music collection spanned numerous CD cases. Today, even the largest music collections can be stored on a single MP3 player. With the massive growth in digital music sales, the music industry is seeing profits drop significantly.

 

Reuters reports that statistics released this week by Nielsen SoundScan show that 2008 was the worst year for music sales since 1991 when the firm began monitoring the category. The numbers show that total album sales fell 14% over the year with 428.4 million units sold during the 52 weeks ending on December 28.

 

According to the figures, sales have dropped 45% from the highest point seen by the industry in 2000 when 785.1 million albums were sold. According to Reuters, the biggest reasons for such a precipitous drop are music pirates and other forms of entertainment like video games. The global recession also accounted for some of the loss in sales.

 

Digital track sales though retailers like iTunes grew 27% to 10.7 billion units sold. The growth rate is less than the 45% increase seen in 2007 so growth in digital track sales is slowing. Ringtones were important this year and sales of the top 100 mastertone ringers dropped 33% to 43.8 million units. Only one of the mastertone's broke the 2 million sold mark -- Lil Wayne's "Lollipop".

 

The rapper also took the award for year's best selling album with 2.9 million units of his "The Carter III" sold. Taylor Swift sold the most albums total this year with 4 million copies of her album "Fearless" and her debut album sold over the year.

 

Despite the slowing, but continued growth in digital music sales, the lower margin digital tracks are unable to make up the money lost to declining physical medium sales. Some of the biggest record labels have bet on the new slotMusic format to help resurrect physical medium music sales.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=13829

[destin139]

its a shame but to be honest it doesnt suprise me, particularly in this economic climate. Edited January 2, 2009 at 07:06 PM by destin139

[CelineRules!]

Well it would help a lot if you could actually find the "physical" CD in stores

 

Half the time I go asking for a particular CD it's by order only.. no wonder sales are going down, spontaneous sales don't happen anymore

[angeluk2]

yes i agree with you there Sam

 

It is so much down to the cost too,not just piracey.It is so much easier and cheaper to just download(legaly)either the one song you want or even the whole album.

when compared to having to physically go out to your nearest entertainment stockist and (if it is in stock!) buy the product,most digital savvy persons, im sure, would rather spend a couple of minutes on the internet downloading their choice.

The exception being Celine fans of course, who HAVE to have every physical copy of EVERYTHING Celine had ever done!!

[Nikosn17]

IMO 2008 was the worst year for music not only in commercial point of view but also in the quality of the music.

[Nmj]

its because of the downloading

[Bellamy]

Actually I find 428.4 million a 45% drop from the highest point seen by the industry in 2000 when 785.1 million is better than I thought. Cause the big sellers can't even sell half as before, but the total sales doesn't drop so fast.

[saytri]

Yeah i have to agree .... its because of downloadin. Today people prefer to download things rather then buying cds. But obviously ,,, for Celine i prefer having a physical cd!!!!