On January 3, 2014, Billboard, with SoundScan, reported that the sale of digital music had fallen for the first time since the iTunes store opened in 2003. I've been keeping an eye open for an analysis of what this might mean, but at this writing, the news is still very fresh. I'm sure that many will come forward to give reason for why this happened, as time goes on.
According to SoundScan, digital track sales fell 5.7% from 1.34 billion units to 1.26 units, while digital album sales fell 0.01% from 117.7 billion units to 117.6 billion units. The numbers may not seem to reveal much on the surface, but I'm sure that opponents of streaming may think that they have something to worry about.
Rolling Stone Magazine believes that the reason for the decline is that Adele's album "21" finally dropped of the charts. Adele's album sold 5.8 million copies in 2011 and 5.2 million copies in 2012. In 2013, only one album sold more than one million copies and that was Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience, which sold 2.4 million copies. A hand full of other artists that include, Eminem, Luke Bryan, Imagine Dragon, and Bruno Mars all had a million or slightly more in sales. Clearly, popular music has not had many multi-million album selling artists in a number of years.
Of course, the most obvious reason, or at least the one that will most likely get the blame, is streaming. The big three recording companies, Universal, Sony, and Warner, have all made deals with streaming media sites. While digital sales have slipped, some industry insiders feel that any lost profits have been and will continue to be offset by revenue earned from streaming. Streaming may indeed be the reason why overall album sales fell by 8%, with the CD representing 57% of the market and digital downloads representing 41%.
My personal outsider's opinion is that, yes, YouTube, Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes Radio have garnered a great deal of the music consumers attention. The money that comes from streaming is through the use of paid ads placed on the sites. While the notion of streaming was to bring an end to piracy by offering a free alternative, the increase of handheld and mobile devices has given potential music buyers a chance to lighten the strain on their cash flow. I also think that choosing to purchase a mobile device might also make it more difficult to come up with the resources to buy their favorite music, so they use those devices to stream it.
Music is a luxury, and of course, the amount of disposable cash that potential music buyers may have is not what it was in the late 1990s. The economy is booming, but millions are still either under employed or out of work altogether. When major corporations begin bringing people back to the work force, the growth in household wealth will rise as well. Then, luxuries like music can climb higher on a consumer's list of spending priorities.
And, not to beat a dead horse, but, the sound of the market place has continued to become more of a "disposable," quality. By this I mean that, a song with a trendy or quirky nature or has questionable lyrics gets a great deal of attention. The record company that released the song hypes both the record and the artist until it goes to number one on the charts. Months after the height of it's popularity, no one remembers the song or the artist. The more often this happens the more likely it is that music buyers will become disinterested in future releases and may decide that it's less costly just to listen to a song, rather then buy it and then have it become irrelevant.
This is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
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