Slashdot Mirror
More People Bought Physical CDs and Vinyl Than Songs on iTunes Last Year (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader quotes BGR:
Sales from individual song downloads have unsurprisingly been falling with no end in sight, thanks to the convenience of streaming options like Spotify and Apple Music. A new report, though, makes clear just how few people there are these days who will buy individual digital songs -- there are so few of them, in fact, that they were outnumbered in 2018 by people who went old-school and bought actual compact discs and vinyl records.
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, total download sales in 2018 -- for which iTunes led the pack -- dropped almost 30%, to a little more than $1 billion. Purchases of full album downloads likewise fell, by 25%. To put that in context, download sales represented more than 40% of the music industry's revenue back in 2013. Last year? About 11%.
Meanwhile, that drop in sales has resulted in a lop-sided reality that harkens back to the pre-iTunes days. Sales of physical media including CDs and vinyl, according to the RIAA's new report, were down 23 percent but totaled $1.15 billion, thus edging out digital download sales. Another interesting takeaway from the new report: Music fans bought almost $420 million worth of vinyl in 2018, which Cult of Mac notes in a piece today is almost as much as people spent buying album downloads from iTunes last year.
The RIAA reports that "virtually all the revenue growth" for 2018 came from streaming music platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal, which last year collectively added 1 million new subscribers every single month, and now have a record number of more than 50 million subscribers.
"By the way, don't be fooled into reading something positive about CDs from the title of this post," adds BGR. "While physical media sales were down 23%, CD sales themselves slipped 34% for the year to $698 million. That's the first time CD yearly revenue has come in below $1 billion since 1986."
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, total download sales in 2018 -- for which iTunes led the pack -- dropped almost 30%, to a little more than $1 billion. Purchases of full album downloads likewise fell, by 25%. To put that in context, download sales represented more than 40% of the music industry's revenue back in 2013. Last year? About 11%.
Meanwhile, that drop in sales has resulted in a lop-sided reality that harkens back to the pre-iTunes days. Sales of physical media including CDs and vinyl, according to the RIAA's new report, were down 23 percent but totaled $1.15 billion, thus edging out digital download sales. Another interesting takeaway from the new report: Music fans bought almost $420 million worth of vinyl in 2018, which Cult of Mac notes in a piece today is almost as much as people spent buying album downloads from iTunes last year.
The RIAA reports that "virtually all the revenue growth" for 2018 came from streaming music platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal, which last year collectively added 1 million new subscribers every single month, and now have a record number of more than 50 million subscribers.
"By the way, don't be fooled into reading something positive about CDs from the title of this post," adds BGR. "While physical media sales were down 23%, CD sales themselves slipped 34% for the year to $698 million. That's the first time CD yearly revenue has come in below $1 billion since 1986."
I've been getting way more into indie music genres, and by far my most used purchasing platform is now Bandcamp. DRM-free downloads, the ability to preview the entire track or album before buying, stream the purchased music on their mobile app, and the ability to download high-quality AIFF, WAV, FLAC, etc. formats for archivists and packrats like me. Any time I find a piece of music I want to buy, I always check Bandcamp first. iTunes is now my last resort for digital purchase.
you can seriously pick them up anywhere from a few bucks, to a few bucks for a box full, to free sometimes.
When you want to buy music new on Amazon sometimes it's cheaper to buy the physical disk with "Auto-Rip" than it is to buy just the digital album.
Either way, I rip the disk to Ogg/Vorbis and keep it on my phone, and everything else I own. They still sound awesome, and unlike vinyl and tape media they still sound just as good today as the day the original owner bought them fifteen years ago even if they were played hundreds of times. (unless you bought from an ogre that didn't take care of them, then you can still sometimes run the polisher)
As far as I'm concerned buying a few used disks a month is cheaper than a bandwidth draining subscription service, and in time you'll have a better selection than they do anyways. Unless you like pop, in which case the cost and storage of your music isn't the first serious contemplation you need to make about your music.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
The music files are sitting on your local machine, in AAC format, and are all DRM free. I'm not sure how you consider that "renting."
You can argue whether or not you care about having the data in uncompressed format, but beyond that, the argument seems a bit weak. They're both just digital bits on a physical medium.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
you don't really *buy* songs on iTunes, you rent them.
(Same as with any service that doesn't provide you with physical media.)
To be fair, music purchased on iTunes Store since 2009 has been delivered as DRM-free M4A (MPEG-4 AAC audio) files that play on numerous devices. You can back up these files to CD-R, DVD+R, or whatever other physical media you prefer.
But I use Amazon instead of iTunes for one reason: Amazon makes a downloader available as a web application that works in Firefox for X11/Linux. It thus runs on an x86-64 desktop or laptop computer or on an Arm-powered Raspberry Pi computer. Amazon also publishes a native downloader for Android. iTunes Store, on the other hand, relies on a native downloader application available only for macOS, Windows, and iOS, and the Windows version was incompatible with Wine last I checked.
Sure, I bought the songs, except when I updated my Mac, several songs were deleted without my consent or knowledge. I only found out after six months when I synced my iPhone and it reported that some of the songs were no longer available. Apparently this is a bug that goes back at least 2016 that has never been fixed. The songs are no longer associated with the albums that I bought, and the advice online was "you should have backed up your songs." Not very helpful advice after the fact. I have TimeMachine set up, but I wasn't able to go far enough back to restore the missing files. Now I have an album that jump from track 13 to track 16 because of the missing songs.
Yes, you buy the songs from Apple, but Apple can modify your iTunes library without informing you of the changes or requiring your consent. And despite Apple causing the files to be deleted, they are not responsible for any damages.
I regret making purchases through iTunes and having an iPhone, and an AppleTV, that is controlled by an external entity who can change the terms of service at any time.