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Digital music sales are in a free fall, as Spotify does to iTunes what iTunes did to CDs

Digital music sales are in a free fall, as Spotify does to iTunes what iTunes did to CDs

Courtesy of  

online music

Why would you pay $9.99 or more for one album on iTunes when for the same price each month you can hear millions of songs on a streaming music platform like Spotify?

The concept of digital downloads is something more and more listeners are questioning, as new numbers from Nielsen Soundscan show that album and track sales continued to plummet in the first half of 2014. From January 1 to June 29, the industry sold 121 million albums and 593.6 million tracks. Comparing that to the 142 million albums and 682.2 million tracks sold in the first half of 2013, we see declines of 15 percent and 13 percent, respectively. These rates of decline closely matchthe precipitous fall of physical CD sales through the 2000s. In other words, Spotify is doing to iTunes what iTunes did to CDs.

It’s pretty clear that streaming music is to blame for the decline in digital sales. Since 2011, the percentage of music industry revenues generated by streaming has accelerated:

Screen Shot 2014-07-03 at 12.49.01 PM

Keep reading Digital music sales are in a free fall, as Spotify does to iTunes what iTunes did to CDs | PandoDaily.

[Picture by Hallie Bateman]

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