This may come as a surprise to many people but the CD’s will
officially be surpassed by digital downloads this year. The U.S. music
industries biggest revenue source was CD’s, but digital sales this year, which totaled
3.4billion dollars, has surpassed CD sales that only totaled 3.38 billion this
year. According to a Boston based analytics strategy company digital music will
globally surpass physical sales by 2015. So how is this affecting the major
record industries you may wonder, well this has prompted record labels to
license artists’ catalogs of music to online platforms and streaming services
to compensate for the dwindling sale of CD’s. The Boston based analytics group
has also reported that album and digital song sales will increase 6.7 percent
this year while streaming sales will increase by 28 percent this year which
together account for 41 percent of U.S. music sales versus 22 percent globally.
Streaming music platforms like Pandora and Spotify have been
and are the key drivers and are reported to be this why for the next five
years, as their growth and sales continue to grow. While the music industry is
hoping for digital sales while rebuild the market or at a minimum restore it to
something close to it’s past status. With the birth of smart digital devices,
which have app. marketplaces to download applications to give them consumer’s
access to streaming music platforms, technology does not seem to be on the side
of major record labels. On the brighter side this has possible positive
implications for the artist and consumers being in a position to dictate and control
the music and ultimately cut out middlemen, which in this case unfortunately
for them are the major recording labels. This has every implication of record
labels changing their current business models to give artist more control and
rights with regard to their music and provide them the opportunity to be more
of a business partners instead of employees.
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