CD sales are dropping while digital download sales are growing. This is not relly news.
The number of Internet users paying for digital music increased by just over 8 million in 2008 to 36 million Internet users, and purchases of online digital music downloads increased by 29 percent since last year, accounting for 33 percent of all music tracks purchased in the U.S., according to market research firm The NPD Group.
All that comes at the expense of almost 17 million fewer CD buyers in 2008 compared to the prior year, according to NPD’s Digital Music Study, an annual tracking study covering the music industry.
More importantly, total music sales by web users are declining. Here are a couple important trends according to paidcontent.org:
- More paid downloads, less total buying
- Less buying, more listening
This really worries the music industry. But this also exposes an inconvinient truth about the industry.
If the users are doing less buying and more listening now, what were they doing earlier? More buying and less listening. That is because they were buying music that they were not listening to much. One of the big reasons being the album bundling. This was great for the recording industry but not so great for the consumer. Now we can buy only the songs we want and really like. Because we can experience the songs before buying. Which means we are being choosy. There is less inefficiency. Internet puts the power in the hands of the consumer. This is great for the consumer. Artificial inefficiencies of the past that rip off the customers is not sustainable.That is the main reason for the declning total music sales.
[...] more and more of this. The old model of controlling distribution benefits the music labels at the expense of consumers. In the new media that allows for frictionless abundant distrubution, musicians can go directly to [...]
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