Thursday (7/21) on the Guardian’s (London) music blog, Helienne Lindvall writes, “Judging by the media coverage dedicated to digital music one might think the physical format is on its last legs. In fact, even the days of downloads may be numbered as growth in the sector has slowed down considerably over the past year. It seems nobody cares about owning music any more—people are happy to access music via the cloud and stream it from services such as Spotify. It’s as if nobody wants to talk about CDs for fear of sounding like a dinosaur. But while 90% of discussion about the music industry concerns digital consumption and how to monetise it, actual sales show the majority of music fans are, in fact, such dinosaurs. In 2010, according to the BPI, 82.2% of album sales were CDs, with downloads trailing at 17.5% (vinyl and USB sticks took up the remaining 0.3%)—despite there being fewer record stores. Revenue from streaming services is pretty insignificant. In 2009 it represented £24.5m out of £928m earned from recorded music. This year the digital slice of the pie has grown to 25% but much of that increase is due to record labels working to move consumers towards digital.”
Posted July 22, 2011
