CDs sind tot, und Musikdownloads ebenso

CDs sind tot, schreibt der Atlantic und unterlegt die Aussage mit Zahlen:

That doesn’t seem like such a controversial statement. Maybe it should be. The music business sold 141 million CDs in the U.S. last year. That’s more than the combined number of tickets sold to the most popular movies in 2014 (Guardians) and 2013 (Iron Man 3). So „dead,“ in this familiar construction, isn’t the same as zero. It’s more like a commonly accepted short-cut for a formerly popular thing is now withering at a commercially meaningful rate.

And if CDs are truly dead, then digital music sales are lying in the adjacent grave. Both categories are down double-digits in the last year, with iTunes sales diving at least 13 percent.

Insgesamt keine überraschende Entwicklung, besonders nicht für langjährige neumusik.com-Leser.

Now that music is superabundant, the business (beyond selling subscriptions to music sites) thrives only where scarcity can be manufactured—in concert halls, where there are only so many seats, or in advertising, where one song or band can anchor a branding campaign.

Nearly every number in Nielsen’s 2014 annual review of the music industry is preceded by a negative sign, including chain store sales (-20%), total new album sales (-14%), and sales of new songs online (-10.3%). Two things are up: streaming music and vinyl album sales.

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Vinyl accounts for 3.5 percent of total album sales. The CD market (which is dead, remember) is 15-times larger.

Der deutsche CD-Markt steht traditionell stärker da als der US-Markt, aber die Medienentwicklung geht auch an Deutschland nicht vorbei.