Silver Lining
Page: 6,
Date: 07/12/2008
Full Text:
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.
