Mobile Music And Declining CD Sales

Digital music is offsetting the decline in CD sales (a back-of-an-envelope calculation saw a 4.6% decline in album sales reduced to a 0.7% if every 10 digital tracks sold counted for one album), but it’s also changing the music industry. Rather than one blockbuster product labels and artists now see revenue coming from more diverse sources, especially as songs are staying at the top of the charts for far less time than previously.
IHT has a great example from Warner Music: “According to the data, sales of the CD still accounted for roughly 74 percent of the U.S. revenue earned by the company, or roughly $17 million. But sales of an array of individual digital products added almost $6 million. About two-thirds came from ringtones of hit singles, but the figure also included roughly $330,000 from mobile phone games related to the artist and $94,000 in sales of cellphone “wallpaper,” or screen backgrounds.”
And another one from a band that made it big on MySpace: “Konvicted sold more than 283,000 copies in its first week, enough to reach at No.2 on the Billboard chart. On top of that, the album’s two singles sold more than 244,000 copies combined that week at digital music services like iTunes. And a week later, snippets of the same songs captured two of the top three spots on a new chart tracking sales of ringtones, combining to sell 269,000.”
However, digital sales have sputtered this year…”After rising 150 percent last year, sales of digital downloads have increased by less than half as much this year.” I think it’s still too early to call it the end of digital growth, the next couple of years will be important.

Comments have been disabled for this post