World music sales slide despite digital dividend
Downloads on the up
Digtal music sales rose eight per cent worldwide during 2011. Good news for Apple, owner of the download-centric iTunes Music Store, but not for CD sellers: the industry as a whole saw revenues slide three per cent.
Industry organisation IFPI said recorded music sales revenues fell from $16.7bn in 2010 to $16.2bn in 2011.
Source: IFPI
Digital music accounted for $5.2bn of the latter figure - 32.1 per cent of the total. In the US and South Korea, digital's share is more than half the local total: 52 per cent and 53 per cent, respectively.
Digital revenue growth was ten per cent in the UK.
Single-track downloads were up 11 per cent year on year, album purchases up 24 per cent, both in terms of copies downloaded.
The number of users paying to subscribe to a music service leapt by 65 per cent in 2011 to 13.4m, the IFPI reckons. It said 3.6bn downloads were purchased globally in 2011, an increase of 17 per cent.
It claimed taht 28 per cent of internet users worldwide access unauthorised services on a monthly basis, half of them through P2P networks. ®
COMMENTS
Look Out The Window
There's a recession going on out there guys. 3% growth during a recession is not bad going at all. Stop complaining and get back to snorting your coke. No-one needs to get locked up for copying a file FFS.
Not worth listening to - Sez U.
Yes and in Mozart’s day there had been nothing worth listening to since Beethoven and in twenty five years time today’s kids will complain about the poor quality of the then contemporary music and what rubbish their kids listen to.
The more things change the more they stay the same!
Missing interesting data: net revenues
Surely one of the advantages of download music sales for content providers & copyright holders is that the distribution costs are substantially lower than for CDs.
And of course when it's revealed that net revenues for music sales rose as a result of lower costs the Recording Industry Ass. of America and the like will stop bitching about file sharing killing the music industry.
And then I woke up...
