Music Sales Plummet

Posted 08 Jul 2014 in Industry Insights

In today’s world of digital streaming and file sharing, few people actually own the music they listen to. Think about it: services like Pandora and Spotify offer access to their massive collection of music, so why bother stocking up on MP3’s or even physical versions of your favorite song?

Music Sales

For this reason among many, the recent findings by Nielsen Soundscan reveal that while music sales for the first half of 2014 are down 15% at 121 million, the streaming industry increased in size from 49.5 million to 70.3 million streams. Despite the drop in total music sales, vinyl appears to be doing well, moving from 2.9 million to 4 million records sold. This 40% increase is indicative of the increased interest in purchasing physical vinyls, but represents such a small fraction of total music sales that it cannot make up for the overall losses.

Soundscan also examines the financial well being of a number of different albums; so far, the soundtrack to the Disney movie “Frozen” leads with 2.7 million purchases and is the only album to receive over a million sales so far. When a soundtrack to a children’s movie can almost triple the sales of any other record, you know the times have changed. To us here at GND, this figures are perturbing, and we would like to recommend that you readers go purchase an album today.



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