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Digital track sales up as album sales continue decline
US Album sales have seen a decline for several years in a row as sales of digital music continue to soar. However, according researcher Nielsen SoundScan, downloaded tracks fail to make up for a continued decline in album sales.
A total of 229.8 million albums were sold in the U.S. between Jan. 1 and July 1, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures released Wednesday. That's a 15 percent decrease over the same period last year. Meanwhile digital tracks sales increased 49 percent to 417.3 million this year.
The decline for compact disc sales is more drastic than in previous years – 2006 saw a 4% drop compared with 2005, which was 10% lower than 2004 – and various factors contribute to the slide, namely the shift to track downloads, which has grown 659% since 2004, and the loss of nearly a thousand retail outlets from the shuttered Tower and Musicland chains.
Industry insiders say the pop music's emphasis on hit singles is making customers skip the full albums and buy only the songs they want online. There's no question that the music industry is in the midst of huge changes, as the trend is likely to continue in favor of digital music downloads.
A total of 229.8 million albums were sold in the U.S. between Jan. 1 and July 1, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures released Wednesday. That's a 15 percent decrease over the same period last year. Meanwhile digital tracks sales increased 49 percent to 417.3 million this year.
The decline for compact disc sales is more drastic than in previous years – 2006 saw a 4% drop compared with 2005, which was 10% lower than 2004 – and various factors contribute to the slide, namely the shift to track downloads, which has grown 659% since 2004, and the loss of nearly a thousand retail outlets from the shuttered Tower and Musicland chains.
Industry insiders say the pop music's emphasis on hit singles is making customers skip the full albums and buy only the songs they want online. There's no question that the music industry is in the midst of huge changes, as the trend is likely to continue in favor of digital music downloads.
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User Comments (2)
Post a comment| Reachable on July 6, 2007 1:02 PM | The $.39 single and the $4.00 album -- there's the solution
to their problem. They'll more than make up in volume what
they lose in unit price. That, and they must, absolutely must, eliminate DRM.
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| raffaella front on July 7, 2007 1:10 PM | CDs versus Downloads: No Contest With SACD and DVD-Audio long since dead in the water due to inferior marketing and self-destructive DRM paranoia, music downloads are almost certain to be the death knell for audiophile quality music distribution. MP3,like other lossy, compression schemes, sounds fine mainly to two kinds of people: One group are the millions with partial deafness, thanks to cranked up Ipods, EQ boosted TV ads pounding on the ear at its most sensitive bandwidth, earsplitting concerts, sporting events and traffic noise often at or above 85db SPL where hearing loss begins. Much more so than normal aging, hearing loss is chiefly due to high decibel sound exposure. Ears left unprotected, the loss accumulates incrementally but permanently. Many municipalities have abandoned meaningful noise regulation and enforcement, often for fear of antagonizing well organized business lobbies (i.e. grass blower manufacturers winning a landmark deregulation case several years ago being one tiny example). At the same time, the widespread reality of harmful sound pressure levels goes largely ignored by the mass media. Needless to say, the public welfare is often at odds with the profits of big business and corporate think tanks-Joe Politician’s #1 clients. And Fox News and CNN marketing execs know that it’s sex, violence and paranoia that best sell products and ideas. Forgive the digression. The other kind of folk who think music downloads are fine are those who have never heard a well recorded and mastered first gen recording transferred to MP3 (as opposed to WAV, which is NOT a compressed computer audio format) and to CD, with both played back on identical higher-end hardware. A-B tests would prove that most listeners with relatively undamaged hearing would be awestruck by the CD’s superior sound quality. From RIAA Gestapo squads terrorizing CD buying audio enthusiasts to the recent court case ruling illegal Sony’s CD-encoded root kit spy ware, the major record labels have largely themselves to blame for the destruction of their once total lock on commercial music sales. By all means punish the pirates, but persecuting collectors with dozens, if not hundreds of legitimately purchased CDs for copying their favorite songs to enjoy in their car stereo is monstrously greedy and just plain stupid. Besides, if not so in Britain, making one backup copy of a music CD and other software by the original purchaser for personal use is legal in the United States. Still, you can thank your government’s justice department for protecting the rights of the record industry against pirates far more than enforcing your rights as legitimate consumers. Sorry again for digressing. The most essential points are these: 1.) First of all, if you cherish the precious gift of hearing, you must make a lifetime commitment to the never-ending battle to protect that pair of sonic transducers in your head-that are truly almost as fragile as they are immensely complex in design. Make no mistake: SPLs high enough to cause discomfort have the potential to cause some degree of hearing loss with prolonged exposure. Again, this permanent loss creeps up incrementally. What would a sound level meter say about where you set the volume of your home theatre? And don’t forget the higher levels of virtually all TV commercials. Traffic noise had forced me years ago to always drive with all windows up. As incidents of noise continued to increase in frequency and intensity, I was soon compelled to drive with a pair of clean drugstore foam plugs in my ears (CAUTION! Insert/ remove slowly, gently and not too deeply!). Foam ear plugs that you can scoop up a handful of at the audiologist office are a godsend wherever environmental SPLs exceed 80db And nothing beats the quick fix of index fingers against (not in) your ears! In other words: Ear protection by any means necessary! 2.) Unless a hearing test by a licensed audiologist shows you have substantial hearing loss, if you settle for collecting your music via downloads rather than CD, you really don’t know what you’re missing. Bite the bullet just once and invest in some very good audio hardware. Yes, it may be expensive, but be assured with this stuff you get what you pay for. Best bet on a budget: Harmon-Kardon’s award winning AND very affordable CD player-the one with Anagram Technologies’ Q5 algorithm that converts CD sound quality to that truly approaching SACD (Really? Go to anagramtech.com and have a look at the pdfs. Chip makers like Analog Devices don’t partner with just anyone). Feed the player to a well designed stereo preamp, line amp or receiver driving a pair of Sennheiser HD 650, Grado RS-1 or Isophone Proline headphones. With or without EQ or tone controls, load a CD issued by Capitol, Warners, Universal or almost any label and get set to be KOed by drop-dead gorgeous audio-at least compared to what you’ve been putting up with from your lossy downloads. 3.) Here’s something My Space, Napster (are they still around?), those dopes at Tower.com (who not more than a year ago had the perfect online CD store and a kick-ass CD album/CD single search engine) and other music download retailers certainly don’t want you to know: At the least half of all issued CDs have been free of copy protection for years. And for about as long, affordable and perfectly legal computer software can be had at most pro audio retailers (i.e. Sam Ash, Musician’s Friend, Sweetwater, Full Compass, B & H Photo, et al) which, among loads of other things, makes quality CD audio track copying a snap. Entry level versions of Wavelab, Pro Tools, Peak, Logic, Sonar and even much cheaper DAW software not only do CD ripping but offer the computer audio enthusiast unlimited options for customizing and even recomposing his/her favorite music. With a little haggling, you can get M-Powered Pro Tools 7.3. and an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 pci card for $300. A CD audio track is just two channel stereo, so multitrack Pro Tools will run on an ancient Pentium IV pc, or comparable mac desktop or laptop with no problems. There’s nothing you’ll ever want to do to a store-bought CD that you can’t do in Pro Tools or any of these DAWs. Just rip the songs you want and save each as an uncompressed 16 bit/44kHz WAV file and store them on a second internal or external hard drive (not the system hard drive). All these DAWs have effects galore, and what they don’t have you can add as a plug-ins from among dozens of respected audio software developers. Speaking of downloading, there’s also lots of good multiplatform plug-ins and standalone freeware. And that goes double for Linux and other OS users. I chose Pro Tools solely because it runs Serato’s Pitch n’ Time plug-in. I hit heaven every time I hear the Beatles "Happy Just To Dance", Donna Summer's "All Systems Go" and the Beach Boys cover of Burt Bacharach's "Walk On By" with the pitch tweaked down and/or the time expanded by Serato's amazingly transparent plug-in. On the other hand, the audio encoded at the comparatively tiny bit rate used by MP3, RealMedia and other lossy formats would almost certainly sound distorted or much too unnatural if processed by Serato. Who needs to worry about music file sizes anyway? Hard drive storage is cheap. The 200GB Maxtor 7200RPM SATA drive I use for dedicated audio storage will hold at least 10,000 WAV files of CD stereo audio tracks with an average song length of 3 ½ minutes. And if you absolutely must have music portability, there are way better-sounding solutions than I-Pods and the low-fidelity MP3’s compressed enough to store on them. See what’s available at better electronics stores like Sweetwater and Harvey Electronics. But most computer literate people can afford to buy and learn to use pro-level software for making perfect copies of their favorite CD track in minutes. And the record companies, by and large, are not going to stop you either. If anything, they’ve learned-albeit, the hard way-that zero copy protection on CDs equals more CD sales, not less. Most important of all, is that it’s the computer audio hardware and software industry and the end use consumer who can and must save the stunning sound quality of CD from the market madness of MP3 and other dumbed down audio formats. 4.) But the promise of what CD sound quality goes way beyond CD ripping. Sure you can then burn WAV files of CD tracks in chosen order to a CD-RW. But even if your computer has a great burner, why risk any write errors? Why not listen to tracks directly from your storage hard drive? An M-Audio, RME, Lynx, Creative or practically any soundcard’s analog outs can feed a stereo receiver-and the card usually has enough power to directly drive most headphones too. Great sound? You bet, but here’s what audiophiles call great sound: Bypass the soundcard’s often less than perfect D/A converters and analog output stage, by feeding its SPDIF or optical digital output to the input of most surround-sound receivers. That way, you avoid one whole useless stage of D/A conversion. And for those with more bucks, here’s the way to go: Feed the card’s digital output to a very high-end external D/A converter. They range anywhere from the highly affordable Benchmark DAC 1 or Perpetual Technology’s DAC to those with Anagram’s ATF 24/192 MK2 CD upsampling/jitter reduction module (i.e. Camelot Technology, Orpheus Labs, Nagra with more in the coming months) to those like Weiss labs DACs, with their own CD upsampling scheme and a spectacular direct coupled, Class A biased, balanced differential output stage. Connect the analog outputs from ANY of these external DACs to a high end power amp to drive your best speakers (or the DAC’s balanced analog outs directly to self-powered monitors and subs) and you’ll want to start buying CD again by the handfuls. No lie. Can’t be bothered ripping CD’s but want the joys of independent pitch shifting and time scaling (tempo adjust)?? Get a DJ CD player by Numark, Tascam or Pioneer. My choice is the Denon DN-S5000. Feed its SPDIF output to an external high quality DAC and you’re there. And these DJ players also play CD-Rs and CD-RWs. Great music and the hearing acuity to appreciate it demands high def storage formats. Short of SACD and DVD-Audio, nothing comes closer than CD.
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