Boy, didn't see this one coming:
U.S. sales of music compact discs plummeted 20 percent in the first three months of the year as downloading of songs continued to knock the underpinnings from record studio revenues.
Eighty-nine million CDs were sold from the start of the year through March 18 as compared with 112 million CDs sold during the same period in 2006, according to figures released Wednesday by industry tracker Nielsen SoundScan.
Purchases of digitized albums online failed to make up the difference -- instead they dropped from 119 million during that time period in 2006 to 99 million during the first three months of this year, SoundScan reported.
Meanwhile, sales of individual songs in digital format on the Internet rose from 242 million tracks during those months last year to 288 million this year, according to SoundScan.
One song at a time, the ones you want and only those, instead of one or two you like with nine or 10 you don't. Not a big mystery.
Comments
"So far, we have placed all of our intellectual [property] protection on the containers and not on the contents. And one of the side effects of digital technology is that it makes those containers irrelevant. Books, CDs, filmstrips - whatever - don't need to exist anymore in order to get the ideas out. So whereas we thought we have been in the wine business, suddenly we realized all along we've been in the bottling business."
---John Perry Barlow