“Nielsen SoundScan on Wednesday reported the first increase in American album sales since 2004. Total album sales in the US for the first half of 2011 were up one percent year-to-year to hit 155.5 million. Pure digital sales were growing faster at 660 million individual tracks, up 10 percent, and 221.5 million album equivalents, a boost of 3.6 percent,” Electronista reports.
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“The increase is slight but points to the music industry turning the corner and reducing its dependency on CDs,” Electronista reports. “Some of the change has been helped by the forced closure of LimeWire, but mainstream acceptance of paid, downloaded music has been the most commonly accepted factor. iTunes currently controls about two thirds of digital music in the US and is followed by Amazon MP3.”
Read more in the full article here.
More likely Amazon’s $1 album deals did the trick. In particularly, Stefani Germanotta’s album.
Amazon is always the bottom-feeder company. Before Apple entered the music and book industries, Amazon was ripping off musicians and authors by taking 70% of sales value. Now they are offering BOGO and dumping prices to kill the competition.
I know an even better way to boost US album sales:
Kill the RIAA.
IOW: End disrespect for customers.
It so happens that I have the perfect formula for killing leeches. Follow the steps given below and you will rid yourself of leeches. Where applicable substitute the word leeches for RIAA.
– Standing inside your shower recess, check over all your body and sprinkle large amounts of salt onto your leeches and they will fall off. If one is particularly stubborn, light a match then blow it out and with the hot tip burn the leech. Be extremely careful to not burn yourself!!
– Have a shower, and see if any more fall off you. Once you have them off, they will probably still be stuck to your shower recess, and you can’t wash them down the drain either.
– Take some bleach (most domestic shower cleaners and detergents include bleach), and spray the area.
– Wait a minute, and then check. They should all be pretty much dead and should wash down the drain easily by running the water.
More evidence that Jobs and Apple helped save the record industry by providing reasonable way to purchase digital music. There efforts to provide better album value have probably helped as well. Yes, the industry had some bad medicine to swallow, but it needed to be done. The increase in album sales has to come as good news; this was a big sticking point with allowing single song sales on iTunes and elsewhere.
The RIAA?
Album sale decline is almost exclusively the result of rampant piracy. Even indie acts (totally unaffiliated with the RIAA) are pirated anonymously by the millions. With no way to monetize the product the market is dying.
Now it’s popular for pirates and their sympathetic ilk to demonize the RIAA so they can feel better about being pond scum. But were talking about a $1-15 dollar pricing spread, and the people belaboring fantasy conspiracy scenarios of this industry are the dumbest of the dumb, like royal wedding watching stupid. Infants cry when you take away their free candy, adults just go buy what they want.
Mostly I think there an intellectual cultural problem, those that don’t have a history of innovation and intellectual property don’t understand or appreciate the value. I can’t stand them, but if Greatful Dead fans used to follow the band on tour for weeks or months at a time, how big of of a baby are you for whining about the RIAA and $1 song prices? Or even $15 album prices?
It’s spelled ‘Grateful Dead’.
If there are people such as those you demonize, I have no sympathy.
What the RIAA and MPAA have done is reach out and call EVERY customer a pirating criminal. The formula is extremely simple:
Treat someone as a criminal and they will take vengeance against the insult by being a criminal.
Therefore, as I indicated, kill the RIAA and the insult to customers is removed. Therefore, the customers can return to respecting the recording industry rather than feeling like their victim.
Another way to put it is the distinction between what I call the ‘Marketing Moron’ versus the ‘Marketing Maven’. The Marketing Moron despises the customer and has no comprehension of how healthy business actually works. The customer enables the entire business and therefore requires respect at all times. Demonize the customer, parasitize the customer, screw over the customer and the customer will RECIPROCATE.
Marketing Mavens always respect the customer and enable their ability to BENEFIT from products and brand loyalty. This is part of the phenomenon of Apple brand loyalty. Apple very rarely screw the customer. Instead they enable the abilities of the customer to perform and enjoy their work and play.
Like it or not, the ‘Reciprocity Principal’ in business is real and has decimated the music industry. The RIAA is its own worst enemy. Kill them off and the industry immediately benefits. It’s that simple. Bad biznizz is self-destructive.
People want to demonize the RIAA, but the fact is that all those free song downloads (and movie downloads) are stealing. I don’t care how many ways people try to justify their peer-to-peer sharing, the “I only posted what I bought”, etc. The people who downloaded the music or movies didn’t pay for them, didn’t have any right to listen or view them, and no, the Fair Use exception to the copyright laws does NOT apply when you didn’t buy it in the first place (or receive it as a gift, having been bought by someone else).
The RIAA used some pretty aggressive tactics (i.e., a LOT of litigation), but they couldn’t exactly show up on BitTorrent’s doorstep with a baseball bat and Cadillac with a big trunk now, could they?
The music industry resisted digital music for far long (ironically, that will be what saves it), but it did have a right to protect its product from being stolen.
It is both the RIAA and music industry.
Before iTunes, you couldn’t buy a 99 cent song. You had to buy the entire album or buy the single which cost about half as much as the entire album.
Piracy is and was wrong but faces with stiff music prices and ridiculous access to music, piracy made sense.
Apple saw things from the consumer’s point of view while still making business sense to both the industry and the RIAA.
True, Amazon is appearing to be the bottom feeder of the resurgence but in certain limits, they are helping music sales. In other terms, they are ripping off artists and music owners.
I hope that iCloud and iTunes sync service benefits all.
See my diatribe above. I have no sympathy for mindless pirates. However, I entirely understand RECIPROCITY whereby the demonized customer seeks vindication by screwing back the industry that insults them.
Killing the RIAA removes the insult to customer and therefore immediately benefits the music industry. Figure it out before you go all Negative Reinforcement on customers. Science has consistently proven that Positive Reinforcement is what ACTUALLY works in changing people’s behavior. Treat the customer with respect, as is required in any sane business culture, and you’ll get back respect and sales, as you would deserve.
You wouldn’t happen to be an MBA would you? I have zero respect for the self-destructive garbage typically taught at biznizz schools in our current era. ‘HATE THE CUSTOMER’ is the spirit of the age and has driven us into our ongoing economic depression. You have noticed our depression, right?
1) I would guess that a large factor in the increase was the phenomenal success of the Beatles online catalog. Amazing as it still seems after so many years, there was huge pent-up demand for digital downloads of their catalog.
2) Piracy has been an ongoing problem, but the RIAA’s ridiculous litigation against its own customers was ill-advised, counter-productive, and a PR debacle. People are slow to forget things like that.
3) I read an article on BBC News today about British companies complaining about the increasing download problem with movies and TV shows. The number one increase? American TV shows that aren’t yet available in the UK. The problem once again shows how poor the media companies are at handling their own business. If there is such huge demand for “Glee” et al in the UK, why not SELL IT THERE? I know, gotta negotiate all those scary contracts for foreign sales. Bottom line is as always – in the internet age, if you don’t make it available legally, quickly, and relatively affordably then don’t complain when people decide to download it for free. You can have SOME MONEY or NO MONEY. Getting ALL THE MONEY YOU WANT is no longer an option. Your move, corporate idiots.