Digital Music Sales Decline for First Time Since Opening of iTunes Music Store

[snorkelman]

digital music sales of music first released in last 12 months versus same criteria last year might be a better indicator?

e.g. I probably bought a similar a mount of new music this year as previous years but I no longer spend anywhere near as much on back cat stuff as I did in the first few years.

 

[nt5672]

Unless your looking at something like a 64bit MP3, medium has absolutely nothing at all to do with production quality. The Vinyl sounds better thing is a myth. There are crappy Vinyl productions and crappy CD productions. Unless you dropped 5 grand on that turntable, the CD version of anything you try will sound better (assuming it was mastered at the same time by the same person).

It does from the standpoint that any artists using a good mastering engineer will likely have different masters for different mediums. Most mastering engineers will master for vinyl completely differently than for HD/CD, uTube or iTunes. Vinyl cutting will not take the same audio signals as the digital formats. Now it is entirely true that if everything is mastered from the same source it may not make a lot of difference, but for some artists they also mix differently for different mediums or provide a mix and stems for the mastering engineering to optimize for different mediums.

But you are right, unless an artist or label does what I have described then medium does not matter. But the reason the people I know buy HD or vinyl is because it does matter. Just because some music is listed on HDTracks does not mean it is better than other formats. You have to listen and research to find out.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Well, I think everyone knows this. But, you cannot deny that mainstream music has a very homogeneous sound, one that is not shared with artists on indie labels. Years ago (10 years ago), mainstream music used to be fairly varied. Not even more. Even Nirvana wouldn't be signed by a major label today.

Speaking in generalities I think mainstream music has always had a homogeneous sound which is why it's usually so easy to listen to a mainstream pop song and know which time period it was from. 50's rock 'n roll, counter culture rock 'n roll from the 60's, disco from the 70's, new wave and hair metal from the 80's, grunge and rap/rock from the 90's etc., are all easily identifiable.

If people go back to the charts 10 or 20 years ago and see ALL the bands in the top 100 (not just the bands that were good enough to be remembered) I think a lot of the 'music was better X years ago' would stop.

There is some truth to that of course, but consider "our" decades didn't have AutoTune. Recording artists had to have at least some talent.

Don't discount the effectiveness of heavy reverb and vocal layering.

 

[lhotka]

Maybe it's because there's not much good/real/authentic music these days? If sales of artificial/cookie-cutter/no musical talent/invented/autotoned singers are declining, I'm not sure that's a bad thing .

Same thing with the MPAA - instead of blaming delivery systems for declining sales, look at the quality of the product being sold.

 

[kas23]

Speaking in generalities I think mainstream music has always had a homogeneous sound which is why it's usually so easy to listen to a mainstream pop song and know which time period it was from. 50's rock 'n roll, counter culture rock 'n roll from the 60's, disco from the 70's, new wave and hair metal from the 80's, grunge and rap/rock from the 90's etc., are all easily identifiable.

If people go back to the charts 10 or 20 years ago and see ALL the bands in the top 100 (not just the bands that were good enough to be remembered) I think a lot of the 'music was better X years ago' would stop.



Don't discount the effectiveness of heavy reverb and vocal layering.

But there was a time when acts like Ministry, Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, etc were signed to major labels. In my opinion, those days are gone and we will never see them again. Manufactured music aimed at teenage girls is all that can be heard on major labels now.

And, I like reverb. Suits some singers very well.

 

[69650]

I'm not surprised, the whole music industry seems stuck in a time warp. It's 30 years since the CD was launched and they still haven't come up with anything better. The movie industry has embrace new tech with DVD, 3D, HD, BluRay, UHD. The games industry has made huge leaps forward. Yet the music industry seems intent on shovelling out the same rubbish year after year on 30 year old tech.

Why the hell haven't they moved to HD music. Why can't I buy HD tracks on iTunes. Ok it's not for everyone but loyal music fans would certainly embrace it and it would start to differentiate music to own from the streaming services which could stay with the current tech.

 

[kas23]

Maybe it's because there's not much good/real/authentic music these days? If sales of artificial/cookie-cutter/no musical talent/invented/autotoned singers are declining, I'm not sure that's a bad thing .

Correct. 95% of today's music is conceived in the board rooms of major labels. Making and releasing this music is a well-oiled machine much like the assembly line at Ford. They're making money, so I can't say they're wrong. But, it's not genuine music.

 

[David G.]

I've actually purchased more physical cds this year than any previous year. huh

 

[tevion5]

Or we are becoming more selective and won't buy just any old crap the industry produce.

I dream of this day.

 

[DMaki650]

New vinyl is not made the same way as old vinyl was. New vinyl is made from CD Masters so the quality is a lower fidelity then before. So now a days CD is better quality then newer vinyl.

 

[VulchR]

Perhaps if the music companies offered something for us other than predigested, mass-produced drivel, then sales would increase.... In the UK the radio is so poor because of prefabbed music that I lose the will to live whenever I hear it....

 

[SnoFlo]

I'm guessing that 'sound quality' comes up as a very low priority for the majority of people. There was a push to SACD and DVD-A but those formats have floundered, likely to do with the small catalogues available. Again, quality is very mastering-dependent.

In the 60s, 70s and 80s the 'Hi-Fi' was an important part of every home, now no longer. The need for high-quality media departed with those home stereos.

Consumption of music is different now as well. Back then we'd sit back and listen to an LP right through while reading the liner notes, then get up and flip the record: it was an active endeavour. Nowadays, it is passive: stream while working, or doing other tasks.

The former method of listening to music works better for me. From what I see of late in the explosion of interest on (vintage) audio enthusiast forums I gather that I'm not alone in thinking this way. Also, I find it slightly unethical for someone to charge me $9 for a lossy mp3 album which I probably don't even own. Better to own the LP for me.

 

[dysamoria]

Selective much?

Nicki Minaj:

Everybody wanna try to box me in
Suffocating every time it locks me in
Paint their own pictures then they crop me in
But I will remain where the top begins
Cause I am not a word, I am not a line
I am not a girl that can ever be defined
I am not fly, I am levitation
I represent an entire generation
I hear the criticism loud and clear
That is how I know that the time is near
So we become alive in a time of fear
And I ain't got no mother****ing time to spare
Cry my eyes out for days upon days
Such a heavy burden placed upon me
But when you go hard your nay's become yay's

I wish today it will rain all day
Maybe that will kinda make the pain go away
Trying to forgive you for abandoning me
Praying but I think I'm still an angel away
Angel away, yeah strange in a way
Maybe that is why I chase strangers away
They got their guns out aiming at me
But I become Neo when they're aiming at me
Me, me, me against them
Me against enemies, me against friends
Somehow they both seem to become one
A sea full of sharks and they all smell blood
They start coming and I start rising
Must be surprising, I'm just amazing
I win, thrive, soar, higher, higher, higher

Led Zeppelin:

Oh oh oh oh ohh ohh
You don't have to go oh oh oh ohh,
You don't have to go oh oh oh ohh,
Ahh baby, babe please, please, please, please.

Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah baby.
Ah-ah I really love you baby.
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh darlin'.
Ohh~oh~ohh. Oh~ooh~oh.

Oh oh oh oh ohh ohh yeah. Fine.
Ah ah ah ah ahh ahh oh~oh~oh~oh. Fine.
Ah-ah-ahh-ahh-ahh.
Oooh__~ooh~hooh Fine. yeah.
Ah baby, baby, Fine. baby.

Oh my. Both of those are pretty painful. The first reads like a 15-year-old's angsty middle school poetry notebook. The second one reads like pop crap on the radio today.

 

[ersatzplanet]

For me the process is:

Discover the music/artist on Pandora.

Got to Spotify to see what the rest of the album is like.

Go to the local small CD store and buy it used or new (or Amazon)

Rip to hard drive at lossless.

Store in a safe place.

I have re-ripped my collection many times as the compression algorithms got better. The lossless one is the best it can get and still save space. I have had drives fail. This way I always can restore my collection. I have my whole library on a classic iPod too (though not as lossless of course).

 

[LethalWolfe]

But there was a time when acts like Ministry, Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, etc were signed to major labels. In my opinion, those days are gone and we will never see them again.

Maybe, maybe not. But even bands on indie labels can hit the mainstream and shape the landscape (i.e. the Grunge movement where it was hip to go indie and shun the majors). The bands you mentioned seemed to bounce around and were only on major labels during their peak of popularity.

And, I like reverb. Suits some singers very well.

I like reverb too, but it's not like everyone had golden pipes in the pre-AutoTune days.

I'm not surprised, the whole music industry seems stuck in a time warp. It's 30 years since the CD was launched and they still haven't come up with anything better. The movie industry has embrace new tech with DVD, 3D, HD, BluRay, UHD. The games industry has made huge leaps forward. Yet the music industry seems intent on shovelling out the same rubbish year after year on 30 year old tech.

Why the hell haven't they moved to HD music. Why can't I buy HD tracks on iTunes. Ok it's not for everyone but loyal music fans would certainly embrace it and it would start to differentiate music to own from the streaming services which could stay with the current tech.

SACD, DVD-A, FLAC... higher fidelity audio has been available for over a decade but, for various reasons, it's never gained traction with consumers.

 

[dysamoria]

I have no interest in music streaming services.

I want to have my personal collection that provides high quality audio, is not tied to some service and is available freely on my devices without Internet connection.

This is my position too. Most of my music is bought on cd and put into iTunes for convenience. I still listen to CDs. Some of my music is from artists who gave their stuff away free on the web, and it's way better than the mainstream crap on the radio.

Fact is, music has gone the way of portrait painting and stock photography. It's a niche market that hasn't yet realized it is niche. The mass market stuff is barely in the same class as the content of the decades that preceded it. The artists have been greatly outnumbered by the corporate creations and amateurs. Anyone can now make the "music" that people dance to. A few hundred bucks gives you the tools of a formerly professional studio, and even that can be acquired without paying. The only cost is a few pieces of required hardware, and computers aren't exactly costly. The most costly music to make is that which has vocals and real instrumentation, because then you need more than just a computer and pirated software. But a tolerable microphone and mini audio interface isn't going to break the bank as a one time purchase either.

Music is so easily available in free or equivalent distribution methods, and there's so much of it, new and old, that there's no need to hire artists except for original soundtracks, and no need to contract recording facilities with so many cheap home studios.

The economy sucks and music has a much lower priority than food and clothing. The only people paying for music are the few who have disposable income and/or the people who respect the artists they choose to listen to.

This is just an inevitable conclusion to another media type that was once new and inaccessible to most people as consumer and content creator. Eventually it'll stop being news except for the specialist realm, just like how you have to be paying attention to arts channels to find out about new painters, photographers, etc in the art world. People who like pretty pictures can buy them cheap and hang them on their walls casually. Most people don't care who or what it comes from (photo sharing websites prove this). People who appreciate art for art's sake will seek it out and pay more for it. Same for music.

 

[nt5672]

I'm guessing that 'sound quality' comes up as a very low priority for the majority of people.

Exactly, because most people don't associate their lack of desire to listen, to the grating on their ears from listening. They have never before heard good music on a good system. It is no different than most young people being completely happy with Fast Food. They don't know the difference and therefore they don't care. If anyone wants people to care about music, the quality has to come back and the artists and labels have to care. Currently, for the most part, they don't.

 

[djtech42]

It would help digital sales if they offered lossless formats. Right now, you get the same quality with streaming and downloading. But if you could get downloads in perfect quality, it would be an incentive for buying music.

 

[Avatar74]

New vinyl is not made the same way as old vinyl was. New vinyl is made from CD Masters so the quality is a lower fidelity then before. So now a days CD is better quality then newer vinyl.

This is not particularly the problem, because vinyl has lower fidelity than CD Digital Audio. To be more specific, vinyl has a dynamic range of ~80dB and is subject to various imperfections because of the level of detail that can be picked up by a stylus on a continuously wearing groove that also has physical artifacts because of the pressure the cutting stylus puts on every adjacent portion of the concentric groove of the original platter from which all copies are made... i.e. there's frequency and amplitude distortion because the analogue curves are not cut with constant pressure.

CD Digital audio has a dynamic range of 96.7dB and since decibels are a logarithmic scale every 3dB represents a doubling of wave power.

The real issue is that the original master recordings of the past twenty years have been wasting dynamic range by recording at near peak levels... the A-weighted average loudness of these master recordings is in the -3 to -9dBFS range versus recordings of the 1970s which were (surprise) entirely released on vinyl and, due to vinyl's crappier fidelity required more artful mastering techniques that kept Leq(A) at around -22dBFS.

So the reality is that vinyl is a terrible medium but it got its reputation because there's an unfairly weighted comparison with a huge backlog of older material released from the original masters on vinyl, whereas the subsequent releases on CD were often "remastered" to much louder average levels using either brick wall limiters or dynamic range compression processors like FG-X to try to push the volume as hard as possible.

This is of course stupid because in principle, CD Digital Audio, with approximately 16.7 million possible amplitude values per sample/quantization interval, has much greater undisturbable fidelity EVEN taking dithering into account... 24 bit digital audio? Unbeatable... well beyond both the amplitude and frequency response dynamics of the human ear.

There's also the bogus nostalgia factor that falsely colors people's perception of vinyl. If you can find a digital recording of a 1970s album reproduced from the original master and not off a "greatest hits" or "remaster" issue, I guarantee its fidelity excels anything that vinyl is capable of reproducing. It's physically impossible for vinyl to exceed the usable potential of 16-bit Red Book audio.

I think what OP is referring to here is when the vinyl remaster was made from either a recording that was mastered or remastered to CD badly. A properly mastered recording transferred to CD would be better off staying on CD than being transferred to vinyl... Otherwise you should start transferring your digital photographs to crumpled wax paper.

 

[Icaras]

Also Digital albums are very expensive still compared to physical copies which offer superior sound quality and the tactile experience of physical media which people do still enjoy. Also a lot of music is still not available to download atleast not through legal channels so people fall back to ripping physical copies instead.

Did you read the article? Physical CD music sales continued to declined, and at a steeper rate than digital, while iTunes market share rose.

 

[JayCee842]

I sense subscription prices to get even higher for music services.

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On another note Blurred Lines is possibly the worst song I've heard in a decade, it is a rape anthem that is seedy and has a horrid message. I cringe when I hear it. The fact it has been so popular says a lot about society I suppose and should be a bit disconcerting.

I completely agree. I cannot stand hearing my friends play it.

 

[Tiger8]

New music is disposable

I am a big music fan with hundreds of CDs, been to dozens of concerts and follow music religiously. (Needless to say burn through my data via pandora) I only bought two albums last year since honestly music is becoming so...disposable! it's not bad, but it's not great either, and most importantly not enough to hold people's interest for more than a few weeks, and certainly no "timeless classics". This has been the case over the last decade or so, the 2000s weren't good for music

You could be 10 or 100, but as soon as you hear the opening bars of 'starting something' you want to do the dance
As soon as you hear 'staying alive' you burst into disco, even if it was long dead before you were even alive
Whitney Houston died a couple of years back, I was shocked how many kids know the lyrics of 'I will always love you'
And madonna... Dozens of classics (massive catalog)

When was the last time you heard 'umbrella'? How about 'poker face'?

That's why I think streaming works best.

 

[iParis]

One of the biggest bands in the emo scene came back from hiatus, I'm surprised at this article.

From First to Last?

Though, what does that have to do with the article?

 

[Nevaborn]

Did you read the article? Physical CD music sales continued to declined, and at a steeper rate than digital, while iTunes market share rose.

The purchase of physical media is harder to track especially pre-existing material that can be found from superstore to carboot. Sales of new physical media will decline though however there will always be a demand for physical material for reasons Ive previously stated.

As for Itunes market share rising, the purchase, storage and ease of distribution among devices is a draw as is the fact this year Itunes has had a lot of exclusive content notably Beyonce's album.

So why not try to not just post an asinine comment and think about why the Itunes market share rose but still digital sales are falling. If you have a better explanation then say, if not then you shouldn't criticise.

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I am a big music fan with hundreds of CDs, been to dozens of concerts and follow music religiously. (Needless to say burn through my data via pandora) I only bought two albums last year since honestly music is becoming so...disposable! it's not bad, but it's not great either, and most importantly not enough to hold people's interest for more than a few weeks, and certainly no "timeless classics". This has been the case over the last decade or so, the 2000s weren't good for music

You could be 10 or 100, but as soon as you hear the opening bars of 'starting something' you want to do the dance
As soon as you hear 'staying alive' you burst into disco, even if it was long dead before you were even alive
Whitney Houston died a couple of years back, I was shocked how many kids know the lyrics of 'I will always love you'
And madonna... Dozens of classics (massive catalog)

When was the last time you heard 'umbrella'? How about 'poker face'?

That's why I think streaming works best.

Poker Face is on like every other day, can't seem to escape it.

 

[johncrab]

The days of using one song to stick a consumer for $16 for a whole CD full of garbage are over!

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I am a big music fan with hundreds of CDs, been to dozens of concerts and follow music religiously. (Needless to say burn through my data via pandora) I only bought two albums last year since honestly music is becoming so...disposable! it's not bad, but it's not great either, and most importantly not enough to hold people's interest for more than a few weeks, and certainly no "timeless classics". This has been the case over the last decade or so, the 2000s weren't good for music

You could be 10 or 100, but as soon as you hear the opening bars of 'starting something' you want to do the dance
As soon as you hear 'staying alive' you burst into disco, even if it was long dead before you were even alive
Whitney Houston died a couple of years back, I was shocked how many kids know the lyrics of 'I will always love you'
And madonna... Dozens of classics (massive catalog)

When was the last time you heard 'umbrella'? How about 'poker face'?

That's why I think streaming works best.

As with radio back in the day, I want to listen to new things but I don't want to buy everything I hear. Pandora and iTunes Radio (with others like Sirius XM) are replacing traditional, terrestrial radio because it is all ads, programmed by a company far away and just no longer relevant. The new media are replacing radio and giving us more choice than just turning a knob to a different station. Yes, the music industry is getting paid for these new pipelines too, so the whining is mostly for show. The wringing of hands is something the music industry has always done. Like retailers and farmers, they've never had a good year. Sales are always down over the previous year. The sky is falling. The fact is (as you point out), it has become an industry of one hit wonders rather than iconic bands. The artist gets signed, then burned and turned, never to see that five album deal where he/she makes real money after giving away the first to get the contract. It's a corrupt industry which can't stand the light of day that consumer choice shines upon it.