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Music Sales Continue To Tumble
Labels: Albums, music sales, Nielsen, Record industry trends, Soundscan
Music album sales continue to tumble for the record industry...but downloaded music single purchases remained hot -- and growing as a trend.
Nielsen Soundscan released new music sales figures yesterday, saying 89 million CDs were sold from the start of the year through March 18 as compared with 112 million CDs sold during the same period in 2006 -- a 21% decline in CD sales.Purchases of digitized albums online failed to make up the difference -- instead they dropped from 119 million during that time period in 2006 to 99 million during the first three months of this year, SoundScan reported.
Meanwhile, sales of individual songs in digital format on the Internet rose from 242 million tracks during those months last year to 288 million this year, according to SoundScan.
Consumers are sending a message to artists that "while you may have put a lot of thought into the sequence of the album, I only like these three songs," said digital music industry analyst Michael McGuire of Gartner Research.
"It comes back to consumers being in complete control of their media experience, and that is not going backwards," Gartner told AFP while discussing the drop in album sales and the rise in single-song track purchases.
posted by Unknown @ Thursday, March 22, 2007,
