CDs, Vinyl Are Outselling Digital Downloads For the First Time Since 2011 (mercurynews.com)

Digital downloads had a short run as the top-selling format in the music industry. It took until 2011, a decade after the original iPod came out, for their sales surpass those of CDs and vinyl records, and they were overtaken by music streaming services just a few years later. Now, digital downloads are once again being outsold by CDs and vinyl, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. From a report: The RIAA released its 2017 year-end revenue report on Thursday, showing that revenue from digital downloads plummeted 25 percent to $1.3 billion over the previous year. Revenue from physical products, by contrast, fell just 4 percent to $1.5 billion. Overall, the music industry grew for a second year straight. And with $8.7 billion in total revenue, it's healthier than it has been since 2008, according to the report. Nearly all of the growth was the result of the continued surge in paid music subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music. Those services grew by more than 50 percent to $5.7 billion last year and accounted for nearly two-thirds of the industry's revenue. Physical media accounted for 17 percent, while digital downloads made up just 15 percent.

Comments

Re:Amazon autorip

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course he is. Welcome to Slashdot. Let me give you some points of how things run around here:

• It's not piracy. It's copyright infringement. Because, heaven forbid we use a term with negative emotional connotations to call out user's piracy.
• Piracy is not stealing, because it doesn't deprive the record store of the CD which they can sell to someone else. It doesn't matter, in Slashdot-think, whether we deprive the content creator money for their hard work.
• Content creators have an intrinsic desire to create content and don't care if they don't get paid. They, like Slashdot posters arguing this nonsense, live in their basements with their mommys and have no expenses (no mortgages, no food bills, no utility bills, etc.).
• Piracy Copyright infringement actually increases sales, because everyone who gets a pirate copy immediately goes out and buys a legal copy once they decide they have properly "tried" the content.
• The reason why music sales declined once Napster and other file sharing sites took off is because the quality of music went down so much, people just decided to stop buying music. It has nothing to do with the ease of stealing music which the sharing sites enabled.
• Musicians did not get paid for recording music for centuries before it was possible to buy a record, so it's OK if musicians don't get paid because people steal share copies of their music.

Re:Amazon autorip

[Anonymous Coward]

Bored enough to refute this

-Piracy implies personal profit from infringing material, which 99% of "pirates" do not do
-Record stores don't create content, the artists create content, and there are a myriad of ways to support them without middlemen
-Content creators, outside of the independent scene, are paid by publishers/labels before their content is released, and even then they only receive a small percentage after the record store/label takes their cuts
-There have been multiple studies proving piracy does increase sales by providing advertising or allowing people who were otherwise not interested in paying full market price to get a taste of the content in question
-Music in the late 90s/early 00s was indeed pretty shitty, with the rise of nu-metal and oversaturation of grunge rock
-Musicians were paid before recording was possible, either as buskers, troubadors, orchestral players or as personal musicians to the elite rich folk, also see my third point

Piracy exists because current solutions do not provide sufficient competition. Gabe Newell went on the record saying as much, and worked on Steam to develop it as a more convenient and useful alternative to the rampant piracy of PC games. Considering he's now worth billions without being in a publicly traded company, it would behoove the recording industry to take a lesson from his example and figure out how to make music purchasing more convenient/value-added to consumers rather than using draconian practices that drive people to pirate in the first place.