It was my first show after graduating high school—my live music experience at that point consisted of worship bands at my small-town church or dad rock cover bands at the county fair.
The continuing sales drop of music compact discs accelerated to nearly 13 percent in 2006 while fast-growing digital download sales failed to make up for the sales shortfall, according to figures published by the Recording Industry Association of America on Tuesday. Though sales of music in digital formats such as downloads and mobile ringtones more than doubled in some cases during the year, digital sales did not grow fast enough to cover the revenue gap caused by the downturn in CD sales. Consequently overall music sales were down by 6.2 percent to $11.51 billion. The U.S. music industry is struggling… Read more »
A surge in downloaded songs and mobile-phone ringtones failed to make up for declines in sales of compact discs last year, an industry group said. Music downloads almost doubled to about $2 billion last year, accounting for about 10 percent of the industry’s global sales, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in a statement today. While that’s up from 5.5 percent in 2005, it’s still not enough to offset the revenue lost due to piracy and declining sales of physical media such as CDs. “I would like to be announcing that a fall in CD sales is being… Read more »
LOS ANGELES – U.S. album sales, which include CDs and digital albums, fell 4.9 percent in 2006 as an increasing number of consumers preferred to download individual songs from the Web, Nielsen SoundScan said on Thursday. While data from the music tracking company showed overall music unit sales rose 19.4 percent last year due to digital downloads, the growth momentum of that category also disappointed some market watchers. “Not only did year-end 2006 digital sales fall short of our expectations, more concerning is the deceleration in growth during the fourth quarter,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst with Pali Research, wrote in… Read more »
