“Increases in digitally downloaded albums and songs were not enough to offset a nearly 20% plunge in CD sales in the U.S., according to year-end figures published Wednesday by the Nielsen Co.’s SoundScan service,” Ethan Smith reports for The Wall Street Journal.
CD sales declined “to 360.6 million in 2008, from 449.2 million a year earlier—has hurt the four major record labels as they try to migrate to digital sales on services like Apple Inc.’s iTunes Store, which in 2008 surpassed Wal-Mart Stores Inc. as the world’s largest music retailer,” Smith reports. “U.S. album sales including digital downloads fell 14% for the year, while factoring in individual song downloads, sales were off 8.5%.”
“Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group remained the biggest player, with 31.5% of the market. Sony Corp.’s Sony BMG Music Entertainment was No. 2, with 25.3%. Both those companies’ market shares were roughly equal to their 2007 levels. Warner Music Group Corp. gained more than a percentage point to reach a 21.4% share, while No. 4 EMI Group Ltd., amid numerous financial and operational problems, saw its share of the market fall below 9%,” Smith reports.
Full article (subscription required) here.
Music cartels, it’s really quite simple: Go DRM-free and higher quality on iTunes Store and you’ll sell more music.
CDs are dead. Get over it.
I do seriously worry about the loss of quality when comparing CD music versus digital downloaded music.
I also worry about loss of quality. I lay awake almost every night thinking, what am I going to do? This is a real problem. Maybe the federal government can come up with a bail-out plan.
MDN’s take is only part of the “problem” for the cartels. CDs are dead. Why buy a whole album when all you want is only one (or a couple) of the songs.
Not to mention that many, and I mean many, bands (and those with original talent) are doing direct distribution, or signing with independent labels. They have realized that they don’t need the big cartels to sell music, as long as they keep it good.
I really want the cartels to die. They have ruined music for so many years that it would be a wonderful pleasure for me to see them sink slowly and painfully.
This is good news. The stats don’t take into account independents and direct sales, only the cartel’s sales.
oh ya, not just encoding, but crappy speaker systems and small earbuds are diminishing music quality too. Not just low encoding.
My brother has a special room in his house for listening to music. Everything is high end and he is an audiophile.
When I visit him and listen to music with him, I am amazed at what I am missing listening to the same music on my own.
I can not afford what he does. But there is a true pleasure I am missing because I can’t.
CD sales dropped (losses not recouped in digital downloads) because the music currently available (for the most part) SUCKS.
Re: Sixvodkas:
TRUE THAT!
I’m a bit surprised – and gladdened – to hear of the concern over sound quality. Discs could have had a longer lifespan if the, um, “cartels” (boy, MDN really loves that, don’t they) hadn’t retained audio standards set in the early 80s and had, instead, raised standards like EVERYTHING ELSE digital. That’s not just the labels, of course; it’s also the hardware manufacturers’ fault.
Sixvodkas, if the “music currently available” truly SUCKED then how do you explain the increase in music piracy? Please don’t suggest that the music is “good enough to steal but not pay for”; that would be a pretty lame reason.
On a related note, vinyl record sales have doubled; perhaps there is hope for sound quality after all.
I do seriously worry about the loss of quality when comparing CD music versus digital downloaded music. —Megame
Me, too. I saw an ad the other day for a $600 iPod speaker system and couldn’t help wondering why anyone would need such an expensive rig to play compressed music files, which lose a great deal of information compared to the original despite sounding very clear for casual listening. Just as the images taken by the cheapest digital SLR are far superior to those produced by even the best pocket camera, the musical quality of a CD played on a modest home stereo is far superior to even the best reproduction of the same music in mp3 or AAC format.
Music companies aren’t developing new talent like they used to, which is why they sell fewer albums. Most of the music they release is crap.
@Grigori
…how do you explain the increase in music piracy?
Where you getting that information from?
Now if the Justice Department would just look into the music labels collusion against Apple and iTunes.
G4Dualie,
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Being in the music industry, what is your take?
Between puffs of the kind of course.
Jealous.
Grigori,
True dat! Vinyl has the best sound hands down.
Does anyone really give a monkeys toss about a bunch of record companies?
Answer: NO.
There will always be a way to get music, and CD’s are wasteful when the information is recorded as files in the first place.
Why transfer it from one format to another?
So many dinosaurs fighting to keep their old money-grabbing habits, as evolution drags them screaming towards the Death Swamp of history.
Goodbye Music Biz; how can we miss you if you wont go away?
@Bob: Well, if you want statistics, sorry, don’t have ’em, though they’re probably pretty easy to find. “Increase” was a poor word choice, and I apologize for that. Any set of stats alleging piracy are probably a bit dubious in reliability, including – especially – those of the RIAA itself. How about “continued popularity of piracy” instead?
Or, how about realizing that the point wasn’t about piracy itself, but Sixvodkas’ comment regarding the quality of contemporary music? It ain’t all golden oldies being downloaded; I’m sure a ranking search at any of the popular Bittorrent sites will show that the majority of music being shared is contemporary. All decades an all eras have both great and shitty music; it takes a mature listener to hear this, particularly as regards the music they grew up with.
maczac also made a good point: why buy an entire CD for only one or two songs? Of course, this should ultimately be the ARTIST’S decision; not the label’s, not iTune’s/Steve’s/Apple’s, and, yes, not the consumer’s. The manner in which content is distributed should reside with the person or group who created it. Let’s hope more – if not ALL – artists become both free to and opt to release their work in a way which benefits the casual consumer as well as the committed fan (as have Radiohead and NIN, to name two contemporary artists who don’t “suck); ultimately, however, the decision should rest in their hands and their hands ONLY. If they choose to only make their work available in packaged form (or, as MDN loves to say, the “artificial construct” of the album bundle or some such nonsense), that should be their right.
Oh, and regarding the MDN take: you can already “go DRM-free and higher quality” on Amazon’s mp3 store.
@Grigori
Fair enough. There’s a lot of factors affecting the current state of the music industry and I agree that piracy plays its role. But it irks me when I see people putting it entirely on that one issue.
I only download old music.
@ alansky,
“the musical quality of a CD played on a modest home stereo is far superior to even the best reproduction of the same music in mp3 or AAC format”
Maybe your dog might think that but you use human ears.
There is no way you can tell the difference between a 256 kbps AAC file and a CD playing the same passage of any recording you’d like to listen to.
The weak link in any music system is the human ear, not the digital media.
Omygosh- the return of the single!? How about this one- 20 years of ill gotten gains after they killed the ’45 is coming home to roost. Selling consumers 10 crappy tracks to get 2 good ones is coming home to roost.
I own a near state of the art (from 20 years ago) stereo system. It still sounds as good as anything you can buy today for under $40K. There is no question that the AAC / MP3 files can’t compare to a CD and certainly not to good vinyl played on a fine turntable. I have been able to demonstrate this to many folks. The human brain is remarkably good winkling out subtle cues from data. The data just needs to be there.
It is a concern that fine audio quality may disappear if the CD vanishes. It is a also a concern that my entire archive of digital music may be damaged through a catastrophic failure of some component. Short of a fire; at least with everything on CDs, I will have some security.
@ Grigori,
You miss the point. Piracy is forcing the sale of singles over albums. If A Label or a band forces the public to buy music via the artificial album construct, most consumers will just download the good songs for free.
If the good songs are available for 99¢ they will buy them online. The one exception is that rare album that is full of good songs. In that case the album will be purchased.
Any band or Label that increases the price of the good songs to $2 or $3 per single may as well just take out ads saying pirate the good songs on this album.
Just curious, which Label do you work for?
@Al
Last week, my 14-year-old daughter, who doesn’t much think about technology per se, called me in to show me how different her favourite CD of Magic Flute sounded than the AAC files she had made for her iPod!
“You know, Dad”, she said, “with the CD you can almost hear the space between the singers!”
Floored me!
Perhaps with pop and techno, which never really exists in space, your statement may hold, but certainly not for orchestral or chamber music.
Then again, we classics lover hold a tiny, Mac-like market share.
@Al: I work for no label (if you re-read my posts, I think you’ll be hard pressed to find anything record label apologetics, other than dissing MDN’s attitude towards them), nor do I disagree with your basic premise. I merely introduced the topic of piracy of contemporary music as a form of proof that contemporary music doesn’t necessarily SUCK, as Sixvodkas asserted.
However, you seem to be under the impression that the consumer is the only one who should be calling the shots on this – “sell me WHAT I want HOW I want it at the price I choose or I’ll STEAL it” – and that just ain’t so; at least, it certainly shouldn’t be that way. Say I’m a professional writer, and I have just self-published a collection of my short stories, available in bound paperback only (this analogy is a big stretch, I know, but just play along). You come along and say, “I don’t want to buy this whole book, I only want the stories that are ‘any good’ (i.e. the ones YOU happen to prefer), and I only want to pay what I think they’re worth.” You can argue all you want that such a collection is an “artificial construct” that is forcing you to buy stuff you don’t want, but that has nothing to do with MY right as the creator of the content to make it available as I deem fit, perhaps even to my own financial detriment. That I may do so gives you no right to assert piracy as your only alternative. The assertion that the market place (i.e. consumer or the distributor like iTunes or Amazon) should have absolute commercial control over the work of a creator is wrong on more levels than I can count.
Or take it another way: say you’re the new online digital book dealer (iLit or something) and you tell me, “we’ll only sell your books if you let us sell it how we want to sell it, and that means selling your stories individually, despite the fact that you don’t want to sell them that way.” If you think that’s fair and ethical, then I’d be willing to be you’ve never been a content creator of any sort. If I’m overstating your position, I’m sorry, but that’s what your previous post tends to suggest; perhaps I’ve misinterpreted you?
“If the good songs are available for 99¢ they will buy them online.” Really? So, there’s no piracy going on of songs which are available on iTunes or Amazon?
“The one exception is that rare album that is full of good songs. In that case the album will be purchased.” Of course, since we ALL agree on what constitutes a good song and what doesn’t, right?
@prenzelberger: great story! Classical music and jazz are particular victims of the compressed formats.
The day when iTunes and Amazon make higher resolution music available – even surpassing CDs – will be a happy one indeed.