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

Amazon autorip

[OrangeTide]

I've been buying CDs and never opening them when the CD version is cheaper or the same price as than the streaming version due to Amazon offering "AutoRip" on many CDs.

Re:Amazon autorip

[cayenne8]

It's cheaper just to rip them from YouTube. It's not like digital is less popular. You can't count this sort of thing just by sales, lol.

Geez...does NO one care about fidelity at all anymore?!?!?

Or, is that most modern music is so badly composed, performed and so compressed, that it isn't worth it to buy a good copy and play it on a really nice stereo system?

Re:Amazon autorip

[OrangeTide]

As long as I can drink rum and have a parrot, I don't care what you call it.

Re:Amazon autorip

[VernonNemitz]

Owning legal copies of music is cheaper in the long run than paying over and over again for streaming it. And one debacle after another, in the digital-music-storage industry, has made it clear that that type of ownership is not as trustworthy as owning hard copies like CDs or vinyl.

Re:Amazon autorip

[squiggleslash]

What do you mean "any more"? The fidelity of a song downloaded from Youtube is much, much, better than a stereo tape recording of a clear, strong, FM radio broadcast, and probably better than a vinyl record too

It might not be as good as CDs, let alone DVD Audio or SACDs, but it's a hell of an improvement on what we had in the past.

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.

Re:Misinformation as usual from the RIAA

[Rick Schumann]

'Streaming' is shit. Why can't you all see that the Corporate world is trying to move everything in our lives to a 'rental' model? Do you really want to live in a world where you can't own anything yourself? Rich get richer, poor get poorer.