Music Industry Sales Trends (What's The Big Mystery)

Record Sales continue to decline, and I find it hard to believe that there are still disputes over the reason for the decline in revenue.  The IFFP or International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has determined that” U.S. sales were 10 Billion dollars less in 2003 then 8 years prior”, and have declined 10 percent overall since the year 2000.  What I cannot understand is why they are spending money on researching why record sales have declined when it is very obvious that there are a couple of simple explanations for this that I can provide for free.

First you have the internet that has made music accessible to everyone for download through multiple platforms, via smart phone apps, iPods, mp3 players, game consoles etc., this has also opened the door for illegal downloads and pirating that has caused the loss of millions of dollars in the music and entertainment industry. With record labels unsure of how to approach this growing market with their old business models they have been forced to prosecute the very same people who they depend on to sale their material too, which caused backlash from internet savvy consumers and increased illegal downloading and gave way to peer to peer download sites.

Secondly the record labels are still granting large budgets for recording artist to record a large number of songs for an album and hire a large entourage of personnel to support these artists. At the end of the day only about 10 percent of artist signed to major labels sale enough albums to be successful while the remainder end up owing the labels. There is also the extinction of the album; consumers today rarely purchase entire albums they are more interested in downloading their favorite song, which mean labels should be focusing much more on single records rather than full albums.

-J