Album Sales Continue to Plummet

I'm seriously going to push as much as I can this year to see what I can do to turn things around. All I do is bang on to people about music. I've put my cash where my mouth is and started an on-line store and hope to turn into a proper store within 10 years. It's the only job I can see that will make me truly happy!

Billboard is changing the Top 200 Albums chart to include streaming & individual track sales.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/earshot/billboard-200-makeover-album-chart-750592

10 individual purchased tracks = 1 album sale.
1500 song streams from an album = 1 album sale.

I've noticed that as well. Metal Archives have started to include digital releases. Glad someone is trying to keep track of the metal albums though - in years to come, who knows what we're going to miss in the collapse of various stream pages( if it happens).

S.D. wrote:

Just like everything else in society, the top 1% keep running off with all the f*cking money...

The top 1% of music artists collect 77% of all recorded music revenue.

http://factually.gizmodo.com/1-percent-of-recording-artists-earn-77-percent-of-recor-1660094049

Is that the artist's fault though? Seems like it's more to blame on companies like Clear Channel that only play the safe, bankable stuff.

As little as I care about Taylor Swift, I can't fault her for winning the Clear Channel Lottery and getting her music played over someone else. That's like faulting Robert Downey for making 'Iron Man' movies that make millions over indie films that do squat. He's not deciding what gets the push, ya know?

By the way, SD, i'm not arguing with your point. I'm questioning the slant of the article.

Taylor set herself up as spokesperson and thus she's getting the slings and arrows that come with that. She has been accused of doing this whole thing as a PR stunt to get her a better royalty rate from the recently launched Youtube premium music service. Regardless, people ARE discussing the issue at the moment so I suppose that's not a bad thing. But in the end people like Taylor are immune to this entire thing, it's the other 99% that really need better royalty rates.

Sony is talking about backing out of the "free streaming" segment of Spotify. Currently there are about 10 million paid Spotify subscribers and an additional 30 million using the free (ad supported) version. Sony wants to make the albums they own only available to the 10 million that pay, not the 30 million that don't. Sony owns a HUGE music library, if they pull out Spotify will have no choice but to change their business model to accommodate.

I was told, if a band sell physical products, irrespective of how much for, as long as they shift units, the will keep on the label. If not, they get axed. Explains a lot about the bargain bin ethos.

Do you think creating a new format could boost physical album sales? Like SD-card style albums instead of CDs?

No.  New physical formats are not the answer because that moves counter to the direction that society is headed.  People don't want to have to carry "things" around with them to play music, they want to have a smart phone with access to millions of songs.

It's not just music, look at the declines in DVD/blu-ray sales and rentals compared to the astronomical growth of streaming movie services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu). Same with books. It's just the direction things are going and there is no stopping it and definitely no going backward.

Physical media will still exist as a niche market.

Yeah, nobody wants to carry any physical things around except for the machines that play the digital music. Lame...
For those that like real physical copies of albums, it is more that just the music. It's also having the lyrics and artwork to collect and look at.

I use Spotify at work and when I'm out riding buses, etc.  I don't want to carry anything around either.  The funny thing is often the songs I end up playing are stuff I have at home.

I don't think it's "lame", it's just change and life is all about change. You can either accept change or you can deny it and turn into the old guy yelling for the kids to get off his lawn.

S.D. wrote:

I use Spotify at work and when I'm out riding buses, etc.  I don't want to carry anything around either.  The funny thing is often the songs I end up playing are stuff I have at home.

I don't think it's "lame", it's just change and life is all about change. You can either accept change or you can deny it and turn into the old guy yelling for the kids to get off his lawn.  

I feel like I'm accepting the change AND turning into the old guy.

I use Spotify when I'm on my PC at home (listening to Pentagram's Last Daze Here on it right now as a matter of fact) but the rest of the time, I'm still carrying CDs around in a knapsack like a schmuck.

I can accept change to a certain extent, but i don't have to like it and i'll resist going fully digital as long as possible. I'll keep buying cds for as long as they are available.

I will continue to buy cds as long as they are available,although I do put them on the ipod almost immediately and listen to music that way. I don't like the idea of buying music digitally through itunes (or whatever) and will hold out doing so until it's my only choice.

I still buy CDs as a hobby, rip them to my computer, transfer them to an SD card for my phone. Here at home I actually pull the CDs out to play them, but on the road or at the gym or walking aboot, it all comes from my phone. I do use Spotify quite a bit, especially right now when funds are tight and I want to check out new music.

Troublezone wrote:

I can accept change to a certain extent, but i don't have to like it and i'll resist going fully digital as long as possible. I'll keep buying cds for as long as they are available.

What he said.

S.D. wrote:

I use Spotify at work and when I'm out riding buses, etc.  I don't want to carry anything around either.  The funny thing is often the songs I end up playing are stuff I have at home.

I don't think it's "lame", it's just change and life is all about change. You can either accept change or you can deny it and turn into the old guy yelling for the kids to get off his lawn.  

I think there's a wide gulf between natural change and enforced change.

I will learn to code and solder circuit boards to build myself a new high capacity MP3 player if I have to before I'll lean on any streaming service for my music listening -at least insofar as they continue to shaft artists. I don't buy music just to hear this crap - I do it because it's also (nominally) supporting the work of artists I enjoy following. If the "update" screws that entire process, I don't care if they discontinue everything BUT streaming devices. I'll go back to a damn discman if I have to.

We live in the age of planned obsolescence and I call bullshit on having some corporation "instruct" me on the proper modern way in which to acquire and enjoy music.

Now, for an example of natural change, most of the time, I check out my CDs, read the books and take in the artwork before ripping them and throwing them in high quality on my iPod classic (one of two) which is how I carry my music around. I get the benefit of portability AND knowing that money is going to my artists. It's a nice marriage of the collector impulse and the available technology. Being resistant to change would involve stocking up on batteries and insisting on mixtapes and a Walkman as the only portable means of accessing my music.

I'll accept there are better ways, but I hate the near monopolies that FORCE these changes - interestingly enough, to whatever these companies are shilling for that month. Sorry, but I have neither the free cash to spend on untested tech or the inclination to keep buying the new model whenever the old one is outed as crap that needed more time to incubate before they pushed it out the door.

Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything. Last time I checked LP sales are on the rise and CDs are still available to purchase. People act like all this stuff is going to vanish in the next 2 weeks. It's not. Don't want to stream? Then don't. Your choice.

I remember feeling FORCED to buy a CD player because LPs started drying up, kind of funny that almost 25 years later LPs are still around.

It used to be that the music industry had the power to force changes on the general public (like getting them to re-purchase their entire music catalogs a few times with each new technology change) but now it's the general public that is forcing the changes on the music industry.

We may be forcing change on the music industry, but it's starting to feel a bit like the tech industry is taking us AND the music industry for a ride.

Maybe "forced" is too strong a word, but I definitely feel like the tech companies are painting listeners in a corner if they want high quality audio on the go. It's like, "Take your friggin' iPhone and use a streaming service already! We've already discontinued all of the high density portable players, so have fun keeping those iPods and Zunes working."

Honestly, the real shame here is that MP3 players (sorry, portable music devices) are so expensive to make unless you're selling millions that it's not like the walkman or discman where every company had a knock off. If Sony stopped making them, guaranteed someone else would still have one. The iPod WAS, to my knowledge, the only hard drive based portable music player. Every new model coming out is using SD cards for storage, which would be fine if SD cards could hold the same amount of data. Say whatever you like about taking tapes or CDs on the go, at least I wasn't afraid of LOSING the damn things in a pocket!

So, in the case of portable audio, I do feel a bit like options are being curbed, whether via marketplace reality or whatever. Sure, iPods will be available on eBay for years to come and (for the moment) I can still get replacement parts for the ones I own, but who knows what condition they'll arrive in?

Quote :

I remember feeling FORCED to buy a CD player because LPs started drying up, kind of funny that almost 25 years later LPs are still around.

My brother and I were late adopters to the CD as well, we didn't get our first CD player till late '92 if memory serves. We'd been buying cassettes for most of the 80s and were reluctant to change, but every time we went to Tower Records we noticed that they were devoting more and more floor space to CDs while the cassette selection was getting smaller and smaller, so the writing was on the wall.

007 wrote:

I will continue to buy cds as long as they are available,although I do put them on the ipod almost immediately and listen to music that way. I don't like the idea of buying music digitally through itunes (or whatever) and will hold out doing so until it's my only choice.  

I'll probably stop buying at that point. I already have enough music to keep me entertained for more than a lifetime.

Change can suck sometimes...
Like when you have a car that is perfect for you and then they come out with a new one that is not to your liking and it's either buy it or do without.

Fat Freddy wrote:

Quote :

I remember feeling FORCED to buy a CD player because LPs started drying up, kind of funny that almost 25 years later LPs are still around.

My brother and I were late adopters to the CD as well, we didn't get our first CD player till late '92 if memory serves. We'd been buying cassettes for most of the 80s and were reluctant to change, but every time we went to Tower Records we noticed that they were devoting more and more floor space to CDs while the cassette selection was getting smaller and smaller, so the writing was on the wall.

'92?! Bah! I didn't buy my first cd player until 1996! I was way behind the times. I had so many cassettes that I didn't want to switch formats. I'm so glad that I selected cassettes as my format of choice. It's the worst of all worlds - terrible sound and no durability. Hooray for me!

I don't remember exactly when I got my first CD player, but it must have been sometime around '95. And then I had to record the CDs to blank cassettes so I could listen in the car.

I got my first CD player in 1987, but I still mostly purchased LPs until 1992 or so. Most of the CDs I bought either had bonus tracks or were straight digital recordings. My rule of thumb at the time was if the disc said AAD on the back I'd buy it on LP, if it was DDD I'd buy the CD.