While it’s absolutely true that album sales are down 65% from 2000, that still means that 326 million where sold in 2010 in the US alone. That’s a lot of music being sold. 2010 also saw nearly 1.2 BILLION digital downloads sold. Again, a huge amount. Internet radio service Pandora has over 80 million registered users and 30 million active users a month, which is almost one in ten Americans. As of the beginning of 2010, more than 278,000 artists sell their music at CD Baby and over 5 million of their CDs have been sold online to customers. So there are a lot of people out there willing to part with their hard earned money for music.
Now comes the best reason to believe in the industry. As of last week, British singer Adele has sold over 1 million albums in the UK alone since her album 21
was released at the end of January, plus another 325k in the US (check out my Big Picture production blog for an analysis of her hit "Rolling In The Deep.
" People are willing to pay for quality music; they just haven't seen or heard enough of it in a while to get really excited with their pocketbooks in big numbers like they used to.Remember, the music industry only dies when people stop listening. See any evidence of that lately?
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1 comment:
I agree the music industry is not dying, but it is not as lucrative as people would think.
From a small artists perspective the internet has given them an opportunity to market their music and there are more artists than ever. I think it will take some more time for the industry and people to adjust to the new model.
From an music point of view, revenues are down because the cost of the music is much cheaper and it makes it harder for acts to survive.
I will give you an example using figures. If you are selling songs online for a dollar and you sell a million and you have a profit margin of 50 percent, thats worth half a million. Unfortunately the reality for alot of unknown artists if they push super hard and sell say 10,000 songs for 1 dollar then wif u made 50 cents song you'd only get 5000 point.
I agree people are still willing to buy music if its great music.
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