Quote:
Originally Posted by kane
Total music sales are actually going up. But the profits are still dropping. This is from CNET: "For 2008, total music sales rose 10 percent to 1.51 billion units sold, up from 1.36 billion units the year before." the problem is about half of that is singles that sell for 99cents so the profit margin is dropping. CD sales continue to slip and the profit margin on those is huge. Record labels are still putting a ton of money behind artists, but now the payoff for that investment is the sale of a 99cent single or a $2 ringtone not a $15 CD.
You are spot on about the big acts. The top selling albums just aren't as big. Sometimes you have years where there just isn't any of those huge records that sell 6-10 million copies, but I remember days back in the early 90's when a hot band would release an album and sell 800K+ in the first week. You just don't hear of that anymore and I'm sure it is because they sell 300-400K, but also sell a bunch of copies of their hit single and they get a ton of illegal downloads.
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so instead of consumers being forced to buy an album when they really only wanted 3 songs they now buy the 3 songs.
What funny is you seem to see this as a justification to make more draconion copyright laws rather then i don't know produce a better quality album that has significantly higher percentage of good songs.
leveraging the distribution channels (bit torrent etc) to test market the songs so that you have less dogs and more successes (for example).