Digital music sales have steadily risen for nearly a decade straight, coming to prominence with the introduction of Apple’s ubiquitous iTunes Store in 2003 and increasing from there as iTunes and similar services began to replace physical media for many listeners. For the first time in the history of digital distribution, however, sales tapered off in 2013.
According to Nielsen SoundScan, sales of individual tracks dropped from 1.34 billion songs to 1.26 billion songs last year (a decrease of 5.7%), and digital album sales fell from 117.7 million to 117.6 million units (a 0.1% decline) at the same time. Sales of physical CDs continued to go down as well, shrinking from 193.4 million discs in 2012 to 165.4 million in 2013 (a fall of 14.5%).
The drop in pure sales could very well have emanated from a new competitor within the digital market itself. Though sales figures have not yet been published on streaming services, subscription-based and ad supported Internet music purveyors have all but certainly increased in popularity. Pandora Internet Radio, Spotify, Rdio, and similar services had already been around for several years entering 2013, and two major players entered the streaming fray this year as well.
Google, the company responsible for Android, previously had a free music cloud called Google Play Music to which users could upload up to 20,000 songs they already owned and stream them remotely from any location using most web-enabled devices, and in May it introduced a feature dubbed All Access. For $10 a month, users could have unlimited access to a sizeable library of songs and albums, including many new releases, in addition to the free storage already provided by Play Music. This past autumn, Apple introduced its own equivalent streaming player in the form of iTunes Radio.
Even without hard numbers on the quantity of digital subscriptions purchased and maintained this year, it would be unsurprising to learn that the increasingly competitive world of Internet radio and music streaming cannibalized part of the digital market in 2013 when Nielsen does eventually publish those figures.
In a contrasting turn, sales of vinyl records for 2013 jumped 31.9% to 6 million units from 4.55 million the year prior, and now represent 2% of the total music market. Among audio purists, vinyl is often lauded for being an analog format capable of capturing and reproducing the whole sound wave of any instrument, as opposed to digital recording methods and media which only approximate the notes played in the studio and can come up short when trying to play them back. Audiophiles deride mp3 and related file types for compressing music, further distorting it and making the end-product even more distant from the original recording.
That vinyl only comprises a small fraction of the music industry certainly denotes an ever-increasing movement toward portability and convenience, but its rise in annual sales shows there is still a market for listeners who are more concerned with uncompromised sound quality than minimal physical footprints.
[Source: Billboard]