Tuesday, July 9, 2013

A Look At Music Sales So Far

Digital Royalties image
At the half-way point in the year, we can look at music sales and wonder where everything is going again. Here are the facts:
  • Album sales are down by 5.6% over last year.
This just goes to show that we really do live in a single's world. When the business was at its peak, these would've been poor sales for a week, let alone 6 months. On the singles side:
  • Macklemore and Ryan Lewis sold 5.56 million dowloads of "Thrift Shop," which is the fastest selling song for the first 6 months of any calendar year.
  • Digital singles are down by 2.3% from last year.
Obviously some big releases by Jay-Z and Kanye West don't figure into the numbers here, so by the end of the year the overall sales performance can look completely different, but so far, sales aren't setting the world on fire.

Could it be the fact that more people are streaming instead of buying? Perhaps the music isn't compelling enough? What do you think?
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2 comments:

Craig said...

Wow...those are some sobering numbers.

If you are able to find the streaming numbers, I'd love to see them updated in this post or another.

My 'hunch' (and that's all it is) is that streaming is seeing significant growth and is the primary reason for the dip in sales of singles.

Nichole said...


"and the Song gets 45 requests over a 3 hour span...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O9waTaXHY

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