The RIAA would like you to believe that album sales are falling to record lows because of album piracy. They want you to think artists, and record companies are losing money hand over fist.
Well, according to the year end sales numbers, it’s not quite happening the way they say it:
The Nielsen SoundScan figures released Thursday say about 500.5 million albums in CDs, cassettes, LPs and other formats were sold last year, down 15 per cent from 2006’s total.
Including digital track downloads, 584.9 million albums were sold, a decline of 9.5 per cent from 2006.
The number of digital tracks sold totalled 844.2 million, up 45 per cent from 588.2 million in 2006.
Overall music purchases - including albums, singles, digital tracks and music videos - hit 1.35 billion units, up 14 per cent from 2006’s total. [link]
Translation: physical sales suck, digital sales are soaring. Guess what? There is ZERO cost to a digital sale. Press “upload” once and it’s instantly distributed to the planet. Sure, you have to pay bandwidth fees, but that’s not the same as having to pay for physical discs, shipping the discs and all other physical distribution charges.
It’s digital, it’s virtual. Using iTunes 99 cent price, the digital downloads total $844.2M. Almost a $250M increase in sales in one year. Factor in the 50M unit loss in physical sales and I’m sure it’s a virtual wash between the two mediums.
But here’s the figure missing: ringtones. It’s a multi BILLION dollar industry of which no money goes to the artist - it’s all into the companies’ coffers.
Piracy is bad, I get that. But these companies bitch and whine and moan about cd sales when they refuse to accept the fact we’d all rather click on a track than drive to a store to look for one.
The recording industry is doing just fine, thank you very much. However, if more artists like Radiohead, buy into the direct to consumer business model and start selling cd’s themselves - the greed of the companies could be in very dire danger.
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[...] week the recording industry released sales figures showing the sales of physical cds is plummeting. I argued that with digital sales rising, the [...]