Billboard: Digital Music Sales, Services Are Beginning To Soar
Nielsen this week confirmed what SoundScan announced last week - that both digital track and album sales are set to break new records. As reported by Billboard, records in both categories were set in 2011 and both are up again this year, with digital album sales rising 15% while sales of single tracks have increased 6%. "As we look ahead, it's clear that digital music purchases - and consumption through streaming sources - will continue to grow, and that consumers' appetites for digital music will change at the speed of technology," Nielsen SVP David Bakula said in a statement. Interestingly, digital music sales are growing while subscription services and viewership at ad-supported music video services also continue to rise, suggesting that free and paid streaming options are not cannibalizing the download options. Additionally, consumers now have more options in streaming services, including such ad-supported video services as Vevo, audio subscription services (think Spotify), and smart cloud-based music lockers (e.g., iTunes Match). Furthermore, an NPD Group study found that the number of paid download buyers in the U.S. increased 14% to 45 million in 2011. With the growth of innovative services that continue to expand the size of the digital music market, there's evidence that more and more consumers are becoming involved in digital music in a meaningful way. [Full story: Billboard.biz Investors Business Daily]
| Japan Imposes 2-Year Prison Sentences For Illegal Music Downloading In an attempt to halt falling music sales in what is becoming the world's second largest music market, Japan this week enforced a prison sentence of two years for anyone who is caught possessing illegally downloaded music or movies, plus a fine of almost 2 million yen ($25,679). According to the Recording Industry Association of Japan, just one out of ten downloads there is legally purchased, and the paid download music market dropped 16% in 2011, the second consecutive year of declines. This occurred even though the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said global sales of digital music increased 8% last year to $5.2 billion. Japan is hoping to duplicate the success of South Korea, which jumped from 23rd to 11th in the global market after enforcing laws against piracy in 2007. South Korean laws require Internet service providers to send notices to those who illegally download files, and 70% of those stop after the first notice. China is also suffering, as they have the world's largest internet market and 99% of all downloaded music is done so illegally. Interestingly, illegal downloads plummeted 26% in France in 2011 after new strict anti-piracy laws were imposed. [Full story: 411 Mania] |
| Happy Birthday: Digital Music Turned 30 This Week Thirty years ago this week - October 1, 1982, to be exact - Sony shipped the world's first CD player, the CDP-101, and the digital music era was born. While smartphones, iPods, and satellite radios provide a lion's share of digital music listening today, each of these devices (and the music formats they play) can trace their direct lineage back to the "breakthrough technology" of the CD. For trivia buffs, it was the Bee Gees who, on the BBC show "Tomorrow's World" in 1981, publicly demonstrated the CD for the first time by playing their new digital album "Living Eyes." Such music industry luminaries as David Bowie and renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan quickly embrace the platform, and soon thereafter Dire Straits hit the one-million sales mark and cemented the CD's position as the new standard for music. Development of the CD began in the 1970s, when both Sony and Philips independently were researching a digital, optical disc format to replace cassette tapes and records. In 1979 the two companies decided to work together and established a task force of fewer than a dozen engineers who didn't know if they could trust each other. Ultimately the manufacturing process and method of encoding were contributed by Philips, while Sony created the digital error-correction that made reading the data reliable. The new technology was privately inaugurated in 1980, and the first modern CD pressed was Richard Strauss's "Alpine Symphony." [Full story: NBC News] |
Rdio To Pay Artists $10 For Each New Paid Subscriber Under a new artist program, two-year-old Rdio (yes, that's spelled correctly) now will pay musicians $10 for each subscriber they bring to the service, where they can share tracks and playlists on Facebook and Twitter, and potentially induce some followers to subscribe to the service ($5 a month for unlimited online streaming and $10 a month for mobile). According to USA Today, among the artists already on board are Snoop Lion (the artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg) and members of alternative rock bands The Raconteurs and Scissor Sisters. "Fans can discover new music by seeing what their favorite artists are doing on Rdio," company CEO Drew Larner says. "We are saying to artists 'we will pay you directly for bringing us a subscriber, which will get you money in the near term.' But as you help us build our subscriber base, it will address that scale issue and you will ultimately get more money in the long run." Many music listeners take advantage of free internet options on Rdio and such competitors as Spotify and MOG; globally, only about 10 million listeners are subscribers vs. 25 million who subscribe to satellite radio. [Full story: USA Today] |
| Clear Channel, Glassnote Announce Digital Music Pact Clear Channel Media and Entertainment last week finalized an agreement with Glassnote Entertainment Group to "align the companies' business interests" in a deal analysts said was similar to the one it struck with Big Machine Records. According to a company statement issued jointly, the pact helps to establish a business model that "supports the development of a vibrant and sustainable digital music industry to the benefit of all constituencies - artists, music companies, radio, and consumers." Glassnote Founder/CEO Daniel Glass observed, "One of our passions is aggressively finding new and innovative ways to make our artists' music and information more available than ever to their fans. This partnership aligns our business interests more closely with Clear Channel, and we're excited about being part of the drive to grow digital radio faster and bring all of its benefits to music fans." CCM&E CEO Robert Pittman added, "Not only will this agreement expand Glassnote's label and artists' participation in all of Clear Channel's radio revenues; it also creates a vibrant new digital radio business model that we believe will provide more money for the artists and the labels and more digital choices for the consumer." Artists on Glassnote include Mumford & Sons, Phoenix, Two Door Cinema Club, Childish Gambino, Little Green Cars, and Flight Facilities. [Full story: Music Industry News Network] |
| Does Anyone Care About Neil Young's New Music Standard? This week veteran rocker Neil Young Announced he intends to change the way people listen to digital music by pairing Pono, a new iPod-competitive music player, with a high-end "audiophile-caliber" music download service. Specifically, the new platform is designed to offer 192 kHz, 24-bit audio with "digital-to-analogue conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions." The move is a direct response to such services as Amazon, which limit its "unlimited" cloud music storage service to compressed audio files that either were ripped from personal music libraries or purchased online. These "lossy" audio files occupy considerably less space than "lossless" files do, and their corresponding portable audio players hold only a limited number of songs. (The size of the average iTunes music library is around 3,000 tracks, or roughly 15 GB of storage.) Still...aside from self-avowed audiophiles, does anyone really care about high-quality tracks when most people claim to not be able to hear the difference between an MP3 encoded at 256kbps and the lossless original? As noted by Time magazine, unless Young "has some crazy sonic trick up his sleeve - something we've overlooked or failed to anticipate - he's facing a tough sell, at least on the merits of the service's superior audio quality." [Full story: Time] |
Al Bell Presents American Soul Music ... And American Soul TV
If you're into classic and contemporary Soul, R&B, Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Hip-Hop Soul, Rap Soul, and Neo-Soul, we invite you to listen to Al Bell Presents American Soul Music. Former Stax Records owner and Motown Records Group President Al Bell personally has programmed this awesome radio station online, presenting your favorites from the 1960s and '70s [and some '80s], a lot of the best new music that's being released today, and some real gems you haven't heard in a long, long time. Come to www.AlBellPresents.Com and hear it for yourself!
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