(no subject)

[jdotmi]

In an article about how music sales jumped significantly from last year:

Overall music sales -- which includes albums, singles and digital tracks -- increased to 817 million last year, up from 687 million in 2003. It marks the first time since 2000 that overall music purchases went over 800 million, Nielsen SoundScan reported.

"There were 817 million decisions made to purchase music in 2004," Rob Sisco, president of Nielsen Music, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "That's a number that we haven't seen the likes of in years."

Much of it was attributable to an explosion in digital track sales; in 2003, 19.2 million tracks were sold, while 141 million were sold last year, Nielsen SoundScan said.

"The iPod and other carriers of digital tracks are really important in ramping up digital distribution," said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts and senior analyst at the music trade magazine Billboard. "It's very promising that the category has grown as much as it has, and the recent growth has been almost startling."

Sisco noted that digital music sales did not adversely effect the sales of CDs.

My Note: Digital music sales jumped 121.8 million units. The overall jump was around 130 million. And here everyone said that digitizing music would hurt the sales of CDs!

Comments

[voldsom]

Nifty, thank you.

The only thing I can't quite wrap my head around is there definition of a unit. There being a considerable difference between the purchase of an album and the purchase of a single digital track. But any step up is good.

[voldsom]

'their definition' Please excuse me while I shoot myself.

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

Hehe.

Well, a unit is a unit. What said unit is doesn't really matter much. Although, in terms of disc sales, each disc of a multi-disc set counts as one unit, I believe. Singles are still a unit. A lot of digital sales are in single units as well as full albums. I know that on iTunes you get a song for .99 or a full album for 9.99. I don't know how it counts it for units, though.

[dagis.livejournal.com]

Interesting to note is exactly what the industry has meant when it's said that sales have been down these last few years. I don't know that I can find the article again, but a few years ago retail business went from buying very large supplies of music to last them for months, to much smaller, but more frequent buying strategies. End retail purchases increased, but when speaking of lowered sales, the music industry was talking about distribution. 4 million units not sitting in a warehouse, boohoo.