It has been reported that US sales of recorded music will drop to $5.52 billion in 2013. This downward trajectory will extend a pattern that began in 2000, when physical sales started to decline after rising dramatically during the heyday of the CD.
Japan’s Internet music market saw healthy growth in the third quarter of this year but a collapse in the once-mighty ringtone market led to mixed results for the cell phone sector of the country’s digital music industry, according to figures released on Friday.
Total downloads over the Internet and on cell phones totalled 118 million during the July to September period, down 3 percent compared to the same three months of 2007, while revenues grew 11 percent to ¥22 billion, the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) said. The group collects data from most of Japan’s major music publishers.
Growth was strong in the Internet download portion of the market where downloads jumped 30 percent to 10.6 million and revenue surged 49 percent to ¥2.3 billion. The relatively new music video download market more than doubled in size but was still small at 391,000 downloads.
iTunes is a store that is continually on the rise. RouteNote has been a partner of iTunes for the past 6 months and we are really starting to notice in our sales alone that iTunes is still growing at a rapid pace. Over at ReadWriteWeb they have a great article on iTunes and Apple creating an iNetwork. However, there was one graph in the article that stood out and that was iTunes sales over since it began. I have attached the graph below so you can see the growth of iTunes. If your not already selling your music via RouteNote onto iTunes, why the hell not!
Chris Anderson over at The Long Tail has compiled stats showing that the music industry as a whole is still growing!
Overall a lot has been happening in the music industry in the last few weeks, Radiohead, Madonna (leaving her label and signing with LiveNation), Prince, NIN, etc. The results of these have fueled great discussion about the industry and where it is headed.
Chris mentions it is a big mistake to equate the major labels and their plastic disc business with the industry as a whole, and when you stand back and look at all of music, things dont look so bad.
Stats are as follows:
Only CDs are down (-18%). They’re around 60% of the industry not including the MP3 players, but just around 25% if you do include them.
So the problem with the music labels is not that music is an industry in decline, but that they have a too-narrow view of what business they’re in. Madonna’s switch from a label to a concert promoter should be a clue.
I am not too sure if I agree with Chris that portable music players should be part of the music industry, but the remaining facts show the true story.
I see the entire industry moving close together and the majors are slowly losing market share and overall industry dominance. The huge majority of new releases are from the independents and I can see the industry becoming a lot more cut throat thus giving greater opportunities to unsigned and independent bands and labels to make a healthy living without losing huge royalties to the major labels.
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