RSSAlbum music sales drop, singles in renaissance
By Tim Conneally | Published January 4, 2008, 2:35 PM
The Associated Press today reported 2007's substantial decline in the music industry's album sales, illustrating how albums are no longer the vehicle of choice for music consumption.
The year 2007 saw a total of 500.5 million albums sold, including "hard copy" media: CDs, cassettes and LPs -- yes, someone's still out there pressing vinyl. This is a 15% drop from the unit total for 2006, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
The drop in hard copy sales, however, gets adjusted by digital sales. Each single digital track sold counts as 1/10 of an album, so the 844.2 million single tracks sold last year adjust the album sales decrease to 9.5% -- still a substantial decline in the format.
Overall music sales, however, increased 14% from last year to 1.35 billion units sold, thanks in large part to the aforementioned 844.2 million digital tracks, a reported 45% more than last year. And with more major labels sloughing off DRM, digital music sales will only continue to grow.
Billboard's current top selling album is Mary J. Blige's "Growing Pains," which was released on December 18, strategically before the holiday season and the following last week of the year. The last week of 2007 became the biggest sales week of the entire year for music, with a reported 58.4 million units sold.
For some reason, Billboard currently lists the peak position of "Growing Pains" as #1 eight days from today.
Top selling albums of 2007 include Josh Groban's christmas album "Noël," the High School Musical 2 soundtrack, and The Eagles' "Long Road Out of Eden."
Someone's still putting out Cassetts? O_O yikes. Vinyl of course. Real quality sound. But cassettes? Made of the nice ribbon one sees along the highway from time to time.
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One contributing factor to the drop in sales- music now a days sucks.
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Record companies are too rerarted to think that people dont always want the top 40 crap they peddle.
Here in australia i have had to import 70% of my music, lucky for me my music store to which i have been going to for 20 years now is more than willing to do this for me, but he tells me all the time, he sells more country, rock, metal etc than top 40 rubbish.
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Sorry, the music industry lost my revenue when they starting suing anybody and everybody without actual proof, just an IP that could be used by anybody on an unsecured wireless network.
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I wonder if this will bring about new deals with singles in more of a traditional "single" that you would buy, which would include the main track (basically a hit song) and a couple "B-Sides," which would be anything from acoustic versions of the song to just tossaways that didn't make the album. Could they have a package deal (i.e. iTunes sells a song for $2.00 and the extra dollar gets you the acoustic version, a live version, a demo version, a couple tossaway songs)?
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