Growth In Digital Music Sales Slows
An analysis by Billboard's Glenn Peoples of SoundScan data showed that growth in digital music sales is slowing after three years of steady gains. "From 2006 – 2008, annual sales of digital tracks rose between 225 million and 229 million units. In 2009, unit growth fell to 90 million. A similar but less drastic trend is seen in sales of digital albums. From 2006 to 2008, digital albums grew between 15.7 million and 17.5 million units per year. In 2009, digital album sales gained only 10.4 million." (more)
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I dont understand how it said that in 2009, digital album sales gained 10.4 million, looking at the graph They only trend I see is declining revenue for both Digital Album sales and digital track sales, which brings me to the point of wondering if Fisical sales are down and I its pretty much a fact they will continue to go down, just go to best buy, walmart, target they all have considerably reduce their music seccion to clear floor space to sell products which actually sell, and digitals sales are continuing to decline due to free downloads, and torrent sites, it will be hard in the future to get digital sales up if people perception is that the value of music is 0! The Music industry might only be able to aquire revenue from live performances,and licensing ONLY and that will NOT be easy for many Indie artists. If they plan on making a living from music.
I agree John. Some big wigs and ALL artist will have to do a million artist march on Washington. With the hope that the people who make the laws will see that something drastic will have to be done to stop the downloads etc.
The graph is totally misleading, it’s not that the “growth” has slowed it’s dropped drastically compared to not only last year but 2006.
Why are they calling it “growth” it’s “sales”, at least that’s what the graph says.
Totally confused.
The graph is showing ‘growth’ — each point on the graph represents how many *more* tracks/albums were sold that year compared to the previous year. So, ~10 million *more* digital albums were sold in 2009 than in 2008.
This happens in all technology markets — as the pool of new adopters gets smaller, the growth will inevitably decrease. In other words, in 2006 growth was stronger because many people bought music online for the first time.
I think the most interesting point is the divergence between album and track sales in 2009. Maybe the constant blog posts about the death of the album format are premature?
I’ve got a better Idea! How about we just legalise it 😉
I’d love to see solely a Beatport graph, I’ve spent nearly a grand more on there this year compared to last, surely that alone should put a huge upward curve in this great graph in the sky !