Month: October

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In 2008, Amazon has made several deals to help further itself as a download service for digital music. They signed up Pepsi to offer redeemable codes for downloads and other merch at Amazon, as well as making a deal with Rockstar Games to allow players to tag songs from the soundtrack while playing Grand Theft Auto IV to download off Amazon at a later time. Now, Amazon has made two new moves. It is now the digital music sales provider behind MySpace Music and is also the mobile music vendor for Google's new Android mobile phone platform. These are important moves and Amazon has come a long way, but it is still far behind Apple and not yet a threat to iTunes. At the end of 2008, Amazon will have sold 130 million songs, compared to the 2.4 billion songs expected to be sold off iTunes. It is expected for Amazon's sales to surge 60%, up to 208 million in 2009 if they continue to make such deals. Amazon also has the backing of the industry in the sense that everyone is looking for something to seriously compete with Apple's iTunes to have leverage in digital music sales. Other companies like to partner with Amazon because it has DRM-free digital music, unparalleled ecommerce research, providing affiliates with 20% of the revenue from any song purchase (compared to Apple's 5%), and also there is Amazon's Web Services developer program. Its designed to integrate its commerce features with a given site without requiring users to navigate to Amazon's site. Execs say that all the ingredients are there for Amazon to drive rapid expansion.

Month: July

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After the first six months of 2008 have come to a close, we can now look back at the numbers of how the record sales industry has done. While overall sales have continued to fall, digital sales have come close to closing the gap caused by the decrease in physical sales. Sales of albums, including track-equivalent albums (TEA: 10 digital tracks = 1 album), went down 4.7% from last year at the six month mark, but that is only half the rate of decline from the year before. CD sales dropped again, while digital albums and vinyl have each increased. The sale of digital tracks has gone up 30% from last year, and using the TEA formula combines to make digital album sales increase 23.6% from last year. This is good news for the industry, but a problem lies in the drop of current albums. Only three current albums (released within 18 months) have broken the million-unit mark this half year, compared to six from last year. The top-10 bestsellers from this year have sold 9.9 million, compared to 11.6 million last year (down 14.8%). Older titles have sold much better this year. The best-selling digital album more than doubled that of the one from last year. 19 digital tracks broke the million mark, while only 11 did that at this time last year. In genres, Latin suffered the biggest drop, while soundtracks and electronic music were the only two to report a gain. Non-traditional retail showed a 20.2% growth and Universal Music Group retained the largest market share with 31.2%, only slightly down from last year.

Month: February

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Global digital sales grew significantly this past year in both online and mobile sectors. These figures are expected to continue to grow throughout the next few years.

Month: January

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Digital sales increase slowly as CD sales fall by over 10% in major markets in 2007. It is expected that only a few national markets will report overall growth in 2007. This general decline is expected to continue in 2008.

Month: November

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The trade value of the Spanish recorded music market fell by 11% in 2006. Physical and online piracy are cited by industry observers as the main reasons for the ongoing decline.