Comments on: Downloads go up, CDs go down

By: leaveitout

leaveitout — Sat, 03 May 2008 14:53:49 +0000

Sorry, should have said mobiles will match the value lost in CDs since ‘99.

By: leaveitout

leaveitout — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:06:20 +0000

Looking at those figures in comment 16, the value of mobile downloads is greater that standard digital album downloads. That is fairly shocking. Looking at the the trend of mobile downloads, it would look to match cds value in ‘99 in at least 2 years. With even more people getting iPhones and other web-enabled phones business should be well on the way to recovery. Seeing these figures puts all these “record industry woes” into perspective. Its nothing more than a temporal shift which they didn’t foresee. They should quit complaining and telling downloaders they are killing the industry.

By: Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:50:00 +0000

What’s just as noteworthy from that last set of figures is that the record industry’s “best” year was 1999. I would have thought their best year would have been earlier, early to mid 1990s. The CD format pimping was still paying off handsomely just as Shawn Fanning began to appear in the rearview mirror.

By: Mumblin Deaf Ro

Mumblin Deaf Ro — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:40:15 +0000

Also, if you look at the figures for the 1990s, CD sales outstripped cassettes from 1992 onwards, which lends weight to the argument that the 1990s boom was down to a format change.

Here are the inflation adjusted figures (red line at the bottom:

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME02/Trends_and_shifts_Contents.html

2006 sales are roughly equal to the sales in 1992, which was the first year that CD outsold cassettes; also significantly higher (+18%) than the 1989 figure.

By: Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:27:16 +0000

Ro - Thats a good find! I don’t think those figures are index-linked (can’t find any footnote about it) but I think it would be fair to assume that your $7,541m in 1990 would have gone a lot further than your $7,495mn in 2007. It would have employed a lot more people, paid for a lot more recording sessions, signed a lot more bands.

Rock ‘n’ Excel spreadsheets!

By: Mumblin Deaf Ro

Mumblin Deaf Ro — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:16:19 +0000

Thanks for the link Jim.

I dug a bit further and got stats going back to 1990 here:

http://76.74.24.142/DB3DF11A-E271-5BE1-88F0-32D289C741BF.pdf

The interesting thing is that the total value of physical sales in 1990 was $7,541mn, roughly equivalent to the figure for 2007 ($7,495mn) - I am not sure if the figures are index-linked; if not, then physical sales today are relatively higher than in 1990.

These stats show that physical sales grew by 63 percentage points in the five years to 1995 (to $12,320 mn), which I am assuming is down to people replacing their vinyl collections with CDs and buying newly reissued back catalogues on CD etc.

If we make the assumption that the figures for the 1990s were artifically high because of a format change, then we can conclude that the baseline demand for physical sales hasn’t changed in 18 years. Interestingly, this makes the download sales of $2,875m for 2007 ‘new business’ rather than business that is replacing purchases of physical formats.

I’ll see if i can get figures for the 1980s to see if the 1990 figures are typical of the trend before the CD format change.

Rock n’ Roll!

By: Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:29:07 +0000

Love this line

“Staff at the Fort Worth bank were immediately suspicious, according to investigators — perhaps it was the 10 zeros on a personal cheque that tipped them off.”

By: Matt Vinyl

Matt Vinyl — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:27:33 +0000

The record business is expensive these days. Just ask this chap:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/02/usa1

By: Jim Carroll

Jim Carroll — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:05:07 +0000

keith - thing is, MUSICIANS still want to make albums despite consumers demonstrating a per-track appetite. There was an interesting exchange earlier in the year during the roundtable intv conducted by John Meagher in the Indo for the Choice Music Prize. He asked the acts did they envisage a day when albums would disappear and to a man and woman, they said no. http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/choice-cuts-1290248.html

Ro - have a look at this - http://76.74.24.142/81128FFD-028F-282E-1CE5-FDBF16A46388.pdf - it has the figures for US music shipments since 1997. I’ll dig around for other figures and see what comes up.

markg - no worries, I should have pointed to that piece in the original article but due to the confinements of print, I had only 350 words for the piece and concentrated on other stuff.

And surely Warner Music have splashed out a lot of cash on point of sale posters and the like for their Madonna and REM campaigns?

By: markg

markg — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:41:25 +0000

Apologies Jim, I hadn’t fully read the billboard article. At last some sense is prevailing.

Ivor, if these albums sell more in Tescos, the marketing should be heavily focused on point of sale, not TV.