Album Sales Are Dying as Fast as Streaming Services Are Rising (rollingstone.com)

In 2018, Best Buy decided to stop selling CDs, with the change partly brought on by record labels' increasing reluctance to even issue them. Both choices are symptoms as well as causes of a seemingly inevitable trend: Buying music is now going out of style nearly as fast as streaming music is rising. From a report: In 2018, album sales fell 18.2 percent from the previous year and song sales fell 28.8 percent, according to U.S. year-end report figures from data company BuzzAngle, which tracks music consumption. Meanwhile, total on-demand music streams, including both audio and video, shot up 35.4 percent. Audio on-demand streams set a new record high in 2018 of 534.6 billion streams, which is up 42 percent from 2017's 376.9 billion streams.

It's tricky to compare the specific unit numbers of sales to streams --since such a comparison would be pitting continuous playback of a certain piece of music against a one-time purchase of it -- but certain other milestones in the consumption market can help highlight just how much streaming is replacing physical sales and downloads in America. For instance: Even though total song downloads are still in the hundreds of millions, they're coming down in scale at the top. In 2018, there was not a single song that broke 1 million sales -- compared to 14 songs that reached that figure in 2017, 36 in 2016 and 60 in 2015. At the 2 million sales mark, two songs took that trophy in 2017, while five claimed it in 2016 and 16 songs made it in 2015, throwing the modest figures of this year's sales into even sharper relief.

Comments

Re:I, for one, still buy mp3 albums

[mccalli]

Thank you. As a tiny tiny microscopic part of the music industry - hobbyist artist/self-publisher - I keep far more of the revenue from a sale than than from someone streaming. Buy my album? You've bought me a coffee! Thanks. Stream my album? Well, only another thousand or so streams to go and I can get that same coffee...

Re:People are strange

[squiggleslash]

For 'modern' recordings, streaming or CD's are generally the equal of vinyl, so there's no significant advantage to the big black disc.

That should tell you that your conclusion was ultimately a mistake.

On the basic technological level, CDs generally faithfully reproduce a greater part of the original audio than Vinyl is capable of doing. The reason you think the older records are better is more likely to do with the quality of production, before the audio was stamped onto either media, in the 1970s, than it does the medium. Older media is obviously going to sound "better" if the recordings are better than their modern equivalents.

If, comparing like with like, you can't see a difference, then you can't really argue you can conclude one is better than the other. When you've been given identical content on two different mediums, you've found you can't tell them apart. That should tell you that at best vinyl isn't better than a CD (it also says CDs aren't better either), unless you can find technical reasons to support one over the other. As of now, the technical evidence is POP that CDs are higher quality, but possibly not so high anyone can tell the POP that CDs are higher quality, but possibly not so high anyone can tell the POP that CDs are higher quality, but possibly not so high anyone can tell the POP that CDs are higher quality, but possibly not so high anyone can tell the POP that CDs are higher quality, but possibly not so high anyone can tell the SCRATCH erence.