Report: CD Sales Further Decline

AP via Yahoo! News ^ | 8/26/02 | Simon Avery

[GeneD]

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Compact disc music sales decreased 7 percent during the first half of the year, a further indication that online music sharing sites are hurting the recording industry, a trade group said Monday.

The decline cost the industry $284 million in lost sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

The decline, measured by PricewaterhouseCoopers, compares with a 5.3 percent drop in CD shipments in the first half of 2001. The RIAA said the industry uses just-in-time delivery, so CD shipments are reliably indicative of actual sales.

Also Monday, the RIAA released a separate survey of Internet users' music habits, which found that most consumers between the ages of 12 and 54 bought fewer CDs as they downloaded more tracks.

Previous studies independent of the music industry have suggested that access to free music on the Web actually encourages consumers to experiment with new acts and buy more CDs.

"We find a striking connection between people who say they are downloading more and buying less," said Geoff Garin, the pollster for Peter D. Hart Research Associates, who conducted the random telephone survey of 860 consumers for the RIAA in May. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

Of consumers polled whose downloading increased during the last six months, 41 percent reported buying less music, compared with 19 percent who said they were purchasing more, he said.

Among those polled who said they were downloading the same amount as six months earlier, 25 percent said they purchased less music, compared with 13 percent who bought more, Garin said.

The survey also reported that 35 percent said they go straight to an Internet file sharing site whenever they hear an unfamiliar artist they like. Only 10 percent reported that they immediately buy the artist's album.

The poll did not provide information about consumer attitudes on other factors widely considered to be affecting CD sales, including the quality of new releases and the lack of easy-to-use online services from the major recording labels.

"I very strongly conclude that the ability to get music for free is an important factor and has an adverse effect on music purchasing. I would not argue that it is the one and only factor," Garin said.

[TheLion]

You both summed up the problem very nicely. The music stinks and it is too expensive. The great music from the past has allready been bought for the most part. I don't need any more Beatles or Stones albums. Without a transfer to a completely new medium (8-track to cassette to cd to ?) or some great new music, sales will go down hill for quite some time.

[Arthur McGowan]

Maybe the fact that nobody is writing, performing, or recording anything but garbage has something to do with it. I'll bet the sales of reissues of popular music and jazz from 1925-1950 are holding steady.

[Dust in the Wind]

HIGH PRICE BUMP!!
As for me and my house, it has nothing to do with downloading or recording.

[medved]

How's this: Stop charging $14.99 for a f****ing CD and then maybe people will start buying them. Are you listening RIAA???

The music industry has some sort of a serious stupidity problem. There's a price for anything which maximizes profits and that price is not the highest possible price you'd ever get for one copy of whatever it is, and that's simple claculus and Econ 101, but there's no evidence the music industry ever heard of anything like that. Real, real hard to feel sorry for em.

[ganesha]

Rearranging and compiling music by different artists in a new order is a form of value added in itself. By doing this you are creating intellectual property, which is why there is supposed to be fair use.

[2OOOll]

Napster was the best advertising indeed. There is no way to explore new music without buying a CD, then you can't return an open CD to the store when it sucks.
Instead of killing Napster RIAA should've made it legal to share lower quality music with bit-rates say 128 kbs or less and things would've been ok for everyone.

[FatherTorque]

What the RIAA should do is have the music houses set up servers and put their entire music collections on them available for download. You could buy single songs or entire CDs. Make the CD case artwork available as well.

Just think, being able to go to just a few sites and download any song you've ever heard.

One can embrace technology or let it run over them.

[YankeeReb]

I remember the music industry was in the same sort of duldrums in 1979. They whined and moaned, but the 80s turned out to be very very good for them. I am sure they will turn this around, as well.

Exactly... then along came innovative bands and the music video and it seemed like all kinds of creativity. What do you know, music sales soared. Then around the mid 80s commercialization set in and innovation started to dry up. It's been a downhill slide since.

[Looking4Truth]

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Compact disc music sales decreased 7 percent during the first half of the year, a further indication that online music sharing sites are hurting the recording industry, a trade group said Monday.

I was going to post my thoughts without even reading the replys but post number 2 says it all.

Thinking people are sick and tired of the crap that passes for popular music these days. I wish I was better at keeping track of my own posts and links but I've posted those feelings and thoughts on many threads.

The long and the short of it is: "We're tired of your 'formula' crap."

[cinFLA]

How's this: Stop charging $14.99 for a f****ing CD and then maybe people will start buying them. Are you listening RIAA???

It always amazes me when I look in the Sunday ads and see movies cheaper than CD's!

[freebilly]

How's this: Stop charging $14.99 for a f****ing CD and then maybe people will start buying them. Are you listening RIAA???

I recently drove a carload of teenagers to Starbuck's. On the way they wanted to listen to a station that was playing music from the 70's, 80's, and early 90's. When I asked them why they wanted to listened to it, the response was "because it's good."

[jenny65]

The stuff is over priced. DVDs have dropped to the level of VHS because that is what the market demands. No artist should get any more for an album than a writer gets for a book.

We could start a whole new topic on book prices too. Remember when a paperback novel was less than a dollar and a hardback was five or six, ten at most?

I don't have the exact figures, but as I recall, book authors and musical artists make less than a dollar from each copy sold. After manufacturing, marketing and distribution, it's the media companies that get the biggest share of the pot. With what little they do make from CD sales, most recording artists are forced to tour just to make money. Authors usually don't have that option.

Free enterprise in action. (I'm not bashing the system. That's just the reality of it)

[Jimbaugh]

The revenge of NAPSTER. The music stinks ! ! !

[SunStar]

Compact disc music sales decreased 7 percent during the first half of the year, a further indication that online music sharing sites are hurting the recording industry, a trade group said Monday.

Maybe it's due to the fact that the studios are currently releasing COMPLETE CRAP! If Eminem is the "coolest" thing they can offer, it's no wonder sales are declining.

[Illbay]

LP sales are up consistently about 20% from year to year...

Yes, but it's "twenty percent of nothing." How many'd they sell, 40,000?

The only market for LPs is the Electronica/Dance/Trance genre. LPs are used by the DJs at the dance clubs. My daughter clued me in to this a couple of years ago, when she said "all the unknown garage bands are putting out LPs."

[Illbay]

Honestly, I don't know why people like you even bother buying music (well, that's assuming you do; you may well just be pirating stuff off your friends to make your "wonderful" compilations).

Myself, I like many, many different kinds of music. In fact, my problem has never been the "boredom factor," but rather that I could never afford to indulge my love of music through buying all the CDs I'd like to have. I have about 300 right now, but it's still just a tiny fraction of what I like.

So I don't understand ANYONE who'd buy a CD because they like one or two songs. You like the act, and what he/she/it has to say, or you don't. Period.

BTW, my "music jones" problem is now all but solved, since I began subscribing to Rhapsody at Listen.Com. I now have a "collection" of music in my library that's going to keep me listening happily for a long time to come.

[Illbay]

"Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is one of my favorite ballads.

[Illbay]

Jon Anderson's Olias of Sunhillo, Chris Squire's Fish Out of Water...

Wow, you must be the OTHER person who bought one of these! I used to have them on LP, long ago.

[Constitution Day]

"Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is one of my favorite ballads.

I just heard it on the radio one time too many when I was a kid.

[Pravious]

"I too have been burning my CDs into compilations (and mixing in some MP3s for good measure). I own nearly 1,000 CDs that I bought from 1985-2000. Over the last two years, I have bought relatively few new CDs. One reason is because of the RIAA "war" against file-sharing. But the other reason is that having been burning my own CDs, I now realize just how much I was getting ripped off. Consider this. I can buy a stack of 100 blank CDs for about $30. That's about 30 cents per CD! And that's retail. I would reckon that the record companies pay a lot less because they pay wholesale and in bulk lots. Probably more like a dime for a blank CD. Now these record companies have been lying to us all these years, making us think that these "state-of-the-art" CDs were so expensive that they had to charge us $15-20 per CD just to eke out a profit."

The flaw in this is that you're buying CD-R's, which are different than silver-pressed CDs. However, your point about the price is quite valid. I remember when CDs were first introduced, and the record companies came out and said the high prices were simply because it was a new medium, and that they'd eventually come down to the price of LPs. Well, guess what... that day never came (and artists didn't get any additional royalties because of the increased CD price EITHER!).

Doug