[Dixielandjazz] Downloads and CD sales decline as Streamed Music Soars-- NYTimes 7-3-2014

[Norman Vickers]

To:  DJML and Musicians & Jazzfans list


From:  Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola


Here's confirmatory evidence for what most of us have already observed.The
album concept, begun with LPs and continued with CDs had a certain logic.
Album needed a good first piece, interesting musical treats in the middle
and a good closer-something analogous to a good-tasting sandwich.  With
downloads, the concept was unworkable.  Now with streaming music from
various sources plus Youtube, even download sales are declining. One bright
spot, however, as LP sales are increasing.


I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you already knew that! (smile)


 <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/media/index.html> MEDIA-new york
times, july 3, 2014


Downloads in Decline as Streamed Music Soars


By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/ben_sisario/in
dex.html> BEN SISARIO JULY 3, 2014

For the music industry, the good news about this year's sales is not quite
enough to make up for all the bad news.

What's good is the rapid growth of streaming media services like Spotify and
YouTube, which let their customers listen to millions of songs online, often
free. According to data from Nielsen SoundScan that was released on
Thursday, listeners in the United States used such audio and video streaming
services to listen to 70.3 billion songs in the first half of 2014, an
increase of 42 percent from the first half of 2013.

But this growth appears to have come at the expense of traditional sales,
with downloads now joining CDs as a format in decline. According to Nielsen,
120.9 million albums have been sold so far this year, down 14.9 percent from
the first half of 2013. Of those albums, 62.9 million were on CD (down 19.6
percent) and 53.8 million were digital downloads (down 11.6 percent).

Download sales - a major growth engine for the music industry since the
introduction of Apple's iTunes store in 2003 - began to cool several years
ago. But their slip from a format on the rise to one on the decline has come
suddenly. Last year, downloads of individual tracks fell for the first time,
by 6 percent, and in the first half of 2014 they dropped 13 percent, to
593.6 million.

"We're in a period of transition," David Bakula, a senior analyst at
Nielsen, said in an interview. "Two years ago I don't think anyone would
have expected sales numbers to go down this dramatically."

The top album so far this year is Disney's "Frozen" soundtrack, with
slightly less than 2.7 million sales since January and about three million
since it came out in November. The most downloaded track is "Happy" by
Pharrell Williams with 5.6 million sales, and the most streamed track is
"Dark Horse" by Katy Perry, which has been listened to 188 million times.
(That figure does not count listens on Internet radio services like Pandora,
which is not tracked by Nielsen.)

For music companies and the artists they represent, a crucial question is
whether the increasing income from streaming services - which pay fractions
of pennies in royalties each time a song is listened to - will offset the
drop in sales. While many in the industry are bullish on this question,
Nielsen's own formula suggests that, at least so far, it is not enough.

By comparing the revenue that music companies typically collect from sales
and streams, Nielsen calculates that one album sale is equivalent to about
1,500 song streams. Using that formula, along with the industry's standard
yardstick equating an album with 10 downloaded tracks, Nielsen estimated
that overall sales in the first half of 2014 were down about 3.3 percent
from last year.

Nielsen's report noted a bright spot for vinyl albums, which were largely
abandoned by the mainstream music industry during the CD boom of the 1980s
and '90s, but in recent years have been growing steadily among collectors
and audiophiles.

According to the report, four million vinyl LPs were sold in the first half
of 2014, up 40 percent from the same period last year. As recently as 2007,
these records accounted for fewer than one million sales a year.

 
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