CD Music Sales Down 20% In Q1 2007

prostoalex writes "Music sales are not just falling, they're plummeting — by as much as 20% when you compare January-March 2007 with the 2006 numbers. The revenue numbers are actually worse, since CD prices are under pressure. The Wall Street Journal lists many factors contributing to the rapid decline: 800 fewer retail outlets (Tower Records' demise alone closed 89); increasingly negative attitude towards CD sales from big-box retailers (Best Buy now dedicates less floor space to CDs in favor of better-selling items); and file sharing, among others. Songs are being traded at a rate about 17 times the iTunes Store's recent rate of sales. Diminishing CD sales means that you don't have to sell as many to get on the charts. The 'Dreamgirls' movie soundtrack recently hit #1 by selling 60,000 CDs in a week, a number that wouldn't have made the top 30 in 2005."

Welcome to the Asian markets

[TubeSteak]

Jeff Rabhan, who manages artists and music producers including Jermaine Dupri, Kelis and Elliott Yamin, says CDs have become little more than advertisements for more-lucrative goods like concert tickets and T-shirts. "Sales are so down and so off that, as a manager, I look at a CD as part of the marketing of an artist, more than as an income stream," says Mr. Rabhan. "It's the vehicle that drives the tour, the merchandise, building the brand, and that's it. There's no money."

That is exactly how things are in Asia, due to rampant physical CD piracy.

Guess what.
Asia still has a thriving music industry.
They just have to make their money differently.

Too many reasons for the fall

[u19925]

There are just too many reasons why the CD sales are falling. Here are some of them:
* Digital music sales
* Satellite radio
* Music channels on Cable TV
* CD's last forever or can be archived on computer and once the media goes bad, you can burn again. This means no more replacement sales. In olden days people used to buy same album again because the media didn't last forever.
* Lots of DVD/Computer/Games. People are spending their free times on these items instead of listening CD
* You only need one CD for the entire family. Earlier, I used to buy multiple copies of same albums (for car, house, office etc). Not anymore.
* Just a seasonal fluctuation with not too much of great music release. .....

Re:Of course

[Spock the Baptist]

Being well into middle age, allow me to reminisce a bit here.

Back in the late 1970s, the music industry was crying about illegal taping, and how that such piracy was cutting into their bottom line. Yet music sales zoomed to record, pardon the pun, levels in the 1980s.

Why?

Because:

(1) Disco $&%#@*
(2) MTV had just came online, and back then MTV was "all music videos, all the time."
(3) New artists were recording FRESH new music.
(4) The audio CD had just hit the market.

Fast Forward to 2007:

(1) Disco still $&%#
(2) MTV had become old hat , and MTV policy has become ","no music videos, at any time."
(3) New artists are recording FRESH new music, BUT are marketing it in such a way that the RIAA and the labels that underwrite it receive little if any profit from these sales.
(4) The audio CD has become old hat , and the market is shifting to to digital formats that require no physical media, and the recording industry has been slow to embrace these new formats, in complete contrast to their rush to embrace the audio CD back in the early 1980s.

STB

Re:Too many reasons for the fall

[Idbar]

You're also missing internet radio stations, people can hear them in their offices without bringing portable devices. And they are increasingly growing as the access to internet can be obtained almost anywhere.

Re:iTunes Purchase vs. p2p

[dloose]

Lots of BitTorrent clients will let you select which files you want to download. I know for a fact that Azureus does this. Of course, if the contents are in a RAR file this isn't much help. Which is why you should never RAR a torrent.

Re:No wonder - Find That Track...

[Nom du Keyboard]

There was one particular track that I wanted to buy so I queried the sales folk as to the artist name and title. They had no idea and were not provided with any resource to fine out.

If you can remember 5 words of the lyrics, go to Google and search on: "quoted words" +lyrics. You should get pretty much only the song you want with even that few a number of words, as well as a list of various artists who have covered it.

Of course, your next step is to try-before-you-buy, to find the version you enjoy most. One of the magic things of P2P was finding covers of songs you liked by artists you'd never realized had produced them.