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17 Million People Stopped Buying CDs In 2008
Houston 2600 sends along an Ars Technica writeup on the continuing downward trend in the traditional music business: NPD's annual survey found that 17 million CD customers dropped out last year. Among the good news is that streaming services such as Pandora are growing fast. "While overall music sales were up 10 percent in 2008, the year saw a drop not only in CD sales, but also in the number of customers actually purchasing music. But according to a new report, the act of listening to music is actually on the rise. ... NPD's annual Digital Music Study found that there were 17 million fewer CD customers in 2008 than in past years. CD sales have been dropping for quite some time, and while 1.5 billion songs were sold digitally last year, the number of Internet users paying for digital music only increased by 8 million in 2008."
also, I want to know a breakdown of what era the music is being purchased from... the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s or the current decade? Im guessing a big reason for the drop in CD sales is people have filled out their CD collections/replaced all their cassette tapes
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
...but this should show them that their previous business model has failed. It simply cannot function in an Internet-enabled society. How are they going to succeed? I have no idea...I don't have any idea. I have no problem paying for music if I like the band.
I just hope their answer isn't "more DRM." That's shortsighted...the answer to this problem lies in their entire business practice rather than a heavy-handed technical solution. Or maybe, if we're really lucky, we'll witness the dissolution of the RIAA and the rise of smaller, independent record studios.
Ride the skies
I work in a building near a mall. Several times a week I go over there and either eat in the food court or walk around during lunch.
There are TONS of people at that mall every day.
But hardly anyone actually has a bag, or is doing anything more than browsing.
So far, if I had to spit-ball it, I'd guess 22-24 stores have either "temporarily" closed or just boarded their doors.
No one is buying anything right now. The funny thing is, if you have the money, right now is such a ridiculously awesome time to buy stuff.
In short, your assessment is 100% correct IMO.
Sent from your iPad.
TFA says 1.5 billion downloads happened last year. That sounds a bit fishy since Apple alone sold 2 billion songs last year (see e.g. techcrunch article).
Let's add in the metrics that the amount of utter crap has risen by 70%.
I have not bought a new CD for 2 years because most out there are utter garbage. I have bought a lot of used classic (older than 3 year old release) ones and amazon.com non drm mp3's. but no new CD has interested me for 2 years now. One other thing that influenced this was I started my Sirius subscription over 2 years ago as well.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...the retail store is.
I'm serious. Kodak went thru the same process. Focused on selling physical high-volume goods (photo film & paper), they viewed the customer as the store buying stuff in volume - not the individual actually using the product. As a result, when digital photography started catching on, the manufacturer was faced with threats of retail stores dropping their products entirely. You see, the standard drug-store film-processing model required the end user to enter the retail store three times (buy film, drop off film, pick up prints), thus encouraging additional "well, while I'm here..." purchases resulting from the walk-in photo-processing model. Digital photography trashes that model: no longer must the end user come into the store so often ... which upsets the retailer, who then tells Kodak et al "don't go digital or we'll drop your products entirely". Thing is, by considering retailer = customer, the manufacturer doesn't see that the end user is going to go digital anyway and sales of film will eventually evaporate. Scared of losing the "customer" (i.e.: retailer), the manufacturer fails to serve the "real customer" (i.e.: end user), and isn't ready to handle the transition when it finally hits.
Same problem with music. Big labels see the retail stores as the customers, who complain "if you go to digital distribution we won't have anything to sell, so stifle that MP3 stuff or we'll stop selling your product" - not seeing that the end user is, en masse, going all-digital-download. You're not the RIAA's customer, the retail store is.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Pointless consumers whose lives are devoted to working and shopping discover they can't afford to shop any more, yet have no idea what to do with their free time other than going to the mall.
It's like the end of a zombie movie with the zombies wandering around aimlessly with no uninfected brains left to eat.
And we call this civilization.
As a business model, particularly for a small band starting out and trying to get tours going where they can actually make their money on their show fees and merch. you can't sell digital downloads as merch, and you also can't have digital downloads signed by band members (I actually have a few signed CDs myself, and it's really quite nice having them).
Basically, from my perspective, digital distribution could lead to the end of music as we know it. So that's a bit extreme, it's really more like music will become harder to make and tour with.
Record labels are something to be satiated and dealt with, in the eyes of an upstart musician who is still trying to get his first band started. They foot the start up bill for tours, which can often be too pricey to deal with, and they also pay for time in the recording studio. Studio time can be really expensive, and there's just not a lot anyone can do about that. There's always the option of at home recording, however, I don't know if any of you guys have ever tried to record at home, but without at least a few hundred dollars of equipment, you're going to have a hard time getting anywhere. Especially if you want it to actually sound good.
You do have to have music available before you can put it up for download, and you have to money to record it before it can become available.
Then there's also a certain factor of presentation. As a fan of progressive rock and heavy metal, I often find myself listening to albums as a singular entity, and when digital distribution has its way, there's no real uniformity to hold that experience together. The idea of the record as a whole rather than the single song is severely damaged by downloading just one song and not getting the rest of the pieces. I plan on writing a few concept albums before I die, and I know that I damn sure want them to be listened to as a whole. To me, the problem is that this artform of storytelling in music is going to die out because of a distribution method. That seems like a gigantic waste, doesn't it?
Something else that's nice about physical media is that feeling of actually having something. I dislike paying for downloads because you literally have nothing to show for it in the long run, as hard drives get wiped and passwords get lost, not to mention that you usually end up paying for a low quality mp3 or a proprietary equivalent thereof. In closing, digital distribution could literally kill off certain parts of the music listening experience (if internet induced ADD hasn't already).
Or maybe they just got tired of buying RIAA produced crap? I have been talking to my buddies and a lot of them have been doing like me and just buying from local artists, which don't show up in these RIAA numbers. Even in a little state like AR I can have my choice of anything from bluegrass and traditional country to death and speed metal, and everything in between. And frankly you don't feel bent over by the local artists.
The last show I went to I got a T shirt, a nice 12 song CD with nice artwork and liner notes, and a bumper sticker for $25 and got a little 5 song EP CD for free. Hell of a lot better deal than what I would get from an RIAA member. I have also noticed that more and more are doing the tricks I used to do with my old band, like having a raffle for a guitar signed by the band. Every purchase of $10 or more got you put in the raffle. It gives the band another chance to sell you stuff after the show and who don't like raffles? We would pick up these Kramer guitars and basses from MusicYo(sadly no longer in business) for a little of nothing, play them for a couple of songs, and then sign one and give it away. I suppose from the looks of them the bands are using pawn shop specials now, but hell it's still fun and a great way to put butts in the seats.
So maybe they just got tired of feeling ripped off and skipped the middlemen? From the shows I have been seeing the local artists are going out of their way to make sure you have value for your hard earned $$ in this economy. And you know that every dime you hand them isn't going to some fat cat or some lawyer suing kids. So maybe like me they have just decided the RIAA crap isn't worth bothering with. Too much corporate MOR garbage for too much money.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
FACT: human beings "bond" with music in their teens as music has an emotional component and the flood of hormones wreaks havoc with ones emotional make up and ordering. As a result: people "focus" on the music of their "coming of age" or maturation.
FACT: some human beings... I like a lot of new stuff more than the mid-80s music I grew up with. I'll see your fondly-remembered Peter Gabriel and raise you a Stacey Q.
FACT: there has been no decrease in talent, nor has there been a decrease in creativity.
The hell there hasn't. Prior to MTV, a good bit of a performer's success depended on whether they could, you know, perform. Now it's down to how pretty they are in the video, whether they're good sports on reality shows, and whether the autotuner can make them halfway on-key without distorting their tone too much. Turn to the standard ClearChannel outlet and find the music split equally between 1) boy bands, 2) faux-{metal,punk} sanitized rebellion, 3) cute starlet, and 4) dangerous-sounding hip-hop from the suburbs of Des Moines.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?