Not too long ago I blogged that digital sales make up 40% of total album sales in the US already. This figure was from 2009. A couple of days ago the results of 2011 have been published and guess what?! For the first time since the emergence of digital music, digital sales outsell the physical ones by 50,3%! Check this out:
But what do these figures mean in detail? As you can see there’s still twice as many album CDs sold than digital albums. However it is the singles and eps that made the change. No surprise if you ask me. A CD single never made any sense in my opinion. It is over-expensive, the artwork is cheap, there’s no booklet and in most cases there’s just one “real” song + a couple of half-assed remixes. Why should anyone pay 4-6 Euro for that? Most singles sell for 1.99 - 2.99 on iTunes and if you only want your “hit” you never pay more than 1.29, in moste cases 0.99.
An interesting side effect of these developements is that vinyl sales grew by over 36%! Vinyl is becoming a reliable nieche in music sales but I doubt that the same thing will happen to the CD once it’s days are finally gone. There’s nothing cool or nostalgic about Compact Discs, they’re gonna be treated like VHS-cassettes one day.
Oh, and in case you didn’t know: The best selling artist in 2011 was Adele (albums and single tracks, physical and digital). It makes me happy to see that she sold more albums than Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga together.
Source: businesswire.com