Atlantic Records announcement that more
than half its music sales in the U.S. Come from digital products
comes as no surprise. The question is where are all those music sales
going that the Industry cries about.
Fierce Mobile Content puts it this way:
“Despite Atlantic's digital surge,
the music industry has largely given up on hopes that digital
revenues would eventually offset the declining sales of physical
media. Market analysis firm Forrester Research estimates music sales
in the U.S. will slump to $9.2 billion in 2013 from $10.1 billion
this year. The Recording Industry Association of America notes that
music sales totaled $14.6 billion in 1999. “
When everyone says, “the music
industry...” who are they talking about? Are they talking about
the individual, Independent Artist or Band, or even the truly
Independent label that mostly sells music digitally? Who keeps the
numbers on those artists?
This is one of the problems of reporting – everyone is looking at pre-Internet models and numbers. Of course the “music industry” is crying the blues. The model has changed and the numbers and sales have moved elsewhere. Music is still selling and the Collapse of the Music Industry is only an indication that the game has changed, that music sales have moved out of the control of a few into the domain of the many. Those new numbers are probably not enough today to make up the difference that we keep reading about, but those numbers are growing daily – what we need now are numbers that come from someone other than traditional, pre-Internet music model sources.
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