The Let it Burn Blog

The time has come… Digital music downloads outsell physical sound carriers

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.

digital sales cd sales digital music physical music 2010 2011 acuity.music

Digital Sales? Look overseas!

 40% of all record sales in the USA in 2009 were digital… Another 2-4 years and we might have the same numbers at European music markets as well. Note to self: rethink distribution and marketing strategies. For more information check blog.nielsen.com

UPDATE for 2011: Here are some up-to-date figures from 2011. The trend continues.

* Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” became the first digital song to sell more than 7 million tracks on March 20.
* On July 3, Eminem’s Recovery became the first digital album to sell more than one million units; Adele’s 21 is on track to surpass a million units next week. Through the first six months of the year, Adele has the biggest selling; album of the year, digital album of the year, physical album of the year and digital track of the year.
* 21 by Adele, has sold 2.5 million album sales, 1.5 million physical albums and 992,000 digital album sales while “Rolling in the Deep” has been downloaded more than four million times.
* Adele’s 19 is the biggest selling catalog album of the year through the first six months of 2011.
* Lady Gaga’s Born This Way experienced the biggest 1st week album sales of 2011 with 1,108,000 units – the biggest 1st week album sales since 50 Cent’s Massacre in 2005. The album sold a record 662,000 digital albums in the first week of release.
* “E.T.” by Katy Perry tops the chart for best selling digital song for the first six months of 2011 with 4.1 million downloads.
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