“Income from online streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and YouTube is growing rapidly, but not enough to lift the music industry into growth over all,” writes Ben Sisario in Tuesday’s (3/18) New York Times. “According to an annual sales report from … the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, wholesale revenue from recorded music around the world in 2013 fell by 3.9 percent compared with the year before, to $15 billion…. Digital sales last year grew by 4.3 percent around the world, led by a 51 percent increase in revenue from subscription services … offset by declines in downloads and physical sales. Sales of physical formats like CDs, which still supply about 51 of the industry’s trade revenue, fell by 11.7 percent last year. And sales of downloads, a growth business for more than a decade, were off by 2.1 percent. … The federation and various music executives … singled out Japan as a market in crisis that skewed the overall global picture. Sales fell there by almost 17 percent last year… If Japan were removed from the global picture, the report said, sales over all were down by just 0.1 percent.” A separate article in Thursday’s (3/13) Daily News (New York) notes that classical music record sales were up nearly 5 percent last year, representing a bright spot in the market.
Posted March 20, 2014
