digital revenues have overtaken earnings from physical sales.
more digital downloads were sold in the US last year than physical products, they accounted for just a fraction of overall music industry revenues.
Making money from digital recordings has become the music industry's biggest challenge as it faces up to falling CD sales and a persistent piracy problem.
51 per cent of its earnings over the past year came from digital sales.
falling CD sales and illegal downloading.
"Some fans only want to buy the physical disc, some only want to buy a ringtone and a T-shirt, others just want a concert ticket, others want to buy a digital album.
worldwide sales of digital music grew by 40 per cent last year
CDs would continue to narrow.
"Record labels are continually diversifying and moving away from CDs because they know that fans have completely changed the way they are buying music.''
fans buy different things of music: physical discs, ringtones and a t-shirt, a concert ticket, or a digital album; worldwide sales of digital music grew by 40% last year
Sales from Apple's music-related products and services, which include iTunes, rose 38% from a year earlier to $832 million for the quarter ended Sept. 27
Apple sold 11.1 million iPods during the quarter, up 8% from a year earlier.
they said this was the "worst decline in the history of the CD"; physical album sales have plunged about 27% so far in the fourth quarter; digital sales are up
music industries are saying that they might have to rely on single track sales; "single track downloads growing 30% to 532.7 million units in the first half of the year over first half sales in 2007 of 417.3 million units
“In 2007… Physical sales of CDs and DVDs fell 13 percent to $15.9 billion. Sales of downloaded songs and mobile-phone ringtones rose 34 percent to $2.9 billion.“
“piracy is killing the record industry”
“physical and digital piracy cost the U.S. music industry alone $5.3 billion“
Apple Inc. has surpassed Wal-Mart to become America’s No. 1 music store, the first time that a seller of digital downloads has ever beaten the big CD retailers.
Video game companies and other software makers are selling more of their products as downloads rather than CDs.
Songs could be downloaded faster than movies or TV shows, both legally and illegally.
devices such as Apple’s iPod made songs easy to listen to anywhere.
It said it counted every 12 singles sold as one album, and that Apple probably received a boost during the two months by people cashing in iTunes gift cards – which Wal-Mart and other retailers also sell – received during the holiday season.
Apple launched iTunes in 2003, creating an online business model for a music industry that was struggling with plummeting CD sales and online piracy. In addition to selling albums, iTunes offered hundreds of thousands of individual songs for 99 cents each. That was ideal for customers who wanted to buy hot singles or old favorites without buying the whole album.
it reported $808 million in revenue for a category that includes iTunes store sales, a 27% jump from the same quarter the previous year.
Although Apple has given the music industry a new way to sell songs, it has become so powerful that music companies have sought to help create and fortify potential iTunes rivals.
Album sales dropped for a seventh consecutive year, but a dramatic increase in the sale of digital tracks helped keep the music industry afloat in 2006.
"High School Musical" is the first soundtrack to become the No. 1 album since "Titanic" sold 9.3 million copies in 2002, a feat that should have Disney -- an indie in the recorded music field -- smiling.
album sales drop again; high school musical was the 1st soundtrack to become the #1 album since Titanic; "no major label act could beat a TV soundtrack aimed at tweens".
it will become even more critical to find new devices paradigms to capture consumer attention and new business models to sell content and services on those devices
iTunes and other online music retailers are also changing the way music is purchased. Hot and popular are now giving way to Independent artists who are just as likely and able to make their material available on iTunes and other internet resources.
Chinese Democracy topping 1.5 million in CD sales and downloads
the American Music Industry has never been healthier.
“People don’t realize it,” said Stamphammer in a recent interview, “but we started planning for this back during the teen-pop era. In fact, remember when that N’Sync album sold 1.1 million copies in its first week? 50,000 of those were digital files.”
after a half-century of people being able to purchase pop music and doing whatever they wished with those purchases, massive restrictions on computer files didn’t make sense to people.
they saw it as a marketing opportunity: fans of an artist were marketing that artist to other fans. Using the most powerful tool of all: the artist’s music.
What people don’t remember was that the original pricing was 99 cents per song, and $9.99 per album. After about a year, research showed that while people valued their downloads, they didn’t value them in the same way they valued physical media.
After all, one of the ongoing complaints about .mp3 files has always been sound quality, and with bandwidth increasing, storage getting cheaper, and portable devices supporting lossless formats, it only makes sense.
worldwide digital music sales rose to $2.9 billion last year, from $2.1 billion a year earlier. That was about 15 percent of overall sales, up from 11 percent a year earlier and less than 1 percent in 2003.
yet to make up for the shortfall in sales of compact discs
sales of recorded music fell about 10 percent last year, to $17.6 billion
"It's cheap to buy used discs. . . . They sound just the same as new ones,"
Amazon.com
The industry worries that the expanding used market is cannibalizing new-CD sales, as well as promoting piracy by allowing consumers to buy, record and sell back discs while retaining their own digitally pristine copies.
Used-CD shops typically pay customers between $3 and $5 for their old discs, then sell them for $8 to $10. New CDs can be priced as high as $18 apiece.