RollWave35
#KeepPounding
- Joined
- Mar 19, 2011
- Messages
- 4,525
- Reaction score
- 309
As streaming gathers momentum, the U.S. music industry keeps breaking sales milestones -- the wrong kind.
This week's 3.97-million album sales tally is the smallest weekly sum for album sales since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking data in 1991. It's also the first time weekly sales have fallen below four million in that time span.
http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6236365/album-sales-hit-a-new-low-2014As more and more consumers transition from purchasing music to streaming tunes, it's natural to see album sales shrink. This year, there have only been five weeks where album sales were above 5 million.
Larger retailers of CDs, vestiges of an older record business, have been hit the hardest. Through August 24th, CD sales are down 19.2 percent year-over-year while sales at mass merchants and chains have fallen 23 percent and 25.6 percent, respectively.
Record label sales executives are not surprised by the latest downturn. "Sales have been going in the wrong direction all year," says one label sales head. "I guess its overdue, when you look at [the growth of streaming]." This year, label executives finally conceded something there were reluctant to acknowledge last year: Streaming is cannibalizing digital sales.
Any Pit posters still buy CDs?