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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.
If I love a piece of music enough that want to preserve it in my library, I want a CD for backup, even if most times I listen to it as bits on a device
I trust my backup abilities way more than I trust the cloud or streaming services
Most folks steam their music.
Yes, we call them "steamed jams." It's an Albany expression.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
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.
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Because I only pay for that song once. I can listen to it for the next 50 years without paying anything more, and it can't be "discontinued".
I have vinyl going back 70+ years. It was paid for once, and generations of our family can still listen to it.
If you want to rent your music and have its availability subject to the whims of someone else, that's your choice. Some of us, however, prefer ownership.
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.
The headline says "More people bought physical CDs and vinyl than songs on iTunes" but the numbers given are "total download sales in 2018 [were] a little more than $1 billion", "Purchases of full album downloads likewise fell, by 25%", and finally "Sales of physical media... totaled $1.15 billion".
So are we talking about number of people, as said in the headline, or song sales, or album sales, or money?
I clicked through to the report and the most shocking thing to me was that people spent $25 million on ringtones and ringbacks in 2018.
As far as I can tell, the numbers don't account for any second-hand sales of physical media at all, which may not be a thriving market but also isn't trivial, at least in terms of unit sales. Money-wise, it's probably pretty low, due to high supply and low demand resulting in low prices.
Regardless of what they counted or how, I'm pretty sure most artists are still getting fucked.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
But a record, ahhh... that's tangible. Feel it. Smell it. The smell of library. The smell of history. The smell of many rounds of weed cleaned with licenses on the folds of an LP cover.
Run the Hunt EDA carbon fiber along the surface.
Brush off the dust bunnies off the stylus.
Hear the ker-thunk *plop* as the stylus settles into the groove.
Watch the the filaments in the KT-88 power tubes run their cheerful cherry orange. Ditty for the 12AX7s in the preamp. Smell it. Dust on hot glass.
Amaze yourself at the total lack of snap-crackle-pop, because you have a real turntable, not some made-in-china massmarket unit. No, you're running something German, from the mid-70's. When vinyl was the only game, really.
Streaming for convenience. Physical, tangible, for the foreverness.
I'm going to say this very carefully, very deliberately: Fuck... this modern world and its 100% fakeness. Fuck it long and hard, dry, with a very splintered phone pole.
There's *nothing* like that which you can hold, and store, and cherish, and long for, lust for. Fuck this fake digital modern world.
But truly, nothing beats the sheet music in front of you, with your barely-able fingers poised over the ebonies and ivories.
Fuck this modern world and those who worship at its altar.
There's still room for the old ways.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
CDs get lost, burn up in fires, get scratch, lots of things happen. streaming services generally are a much better way to preserve the files.
You think that right up until your streaming service of choice suddenly drops some music you listen to often. There is more music than you think that can drift in and out of music service coverage... this has happened to my wife before.
With a CD, as long as you can read it once you are golden. Just digitize it yourself - using a service like iTunes Match even means you can still listen to it even if it's not on the streaming service the company offers. (not sure what companies besides Apple offer something like iTunes Match).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley