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Industry News

An article posted at MacUser.UK reports on the latest CD sales decline, down worldwide by 10.7 percent over the last six months, with the usual suspects getting most of the blame. But this time there's a new wrinkle, and we wonder why so few people are talking about it.

The usual suspects are of course those of you who copy and distribute digital music tracks without paying for them. We continue to question whether this is really so, while recognizing that the easy reproduction of digitally-mastered material puts the whole fileswapping movement in a different category from the old practice of making tapes of your LPs to give to your friends.

The article does bring up a point we haven't heard before, however:

Amid all the talk of the supposed damage that downloading is doing to the industry, there has been little mention of the effect that the end of the CD-replacement cycle has had. Since CDs first began shifting in significant volumes towards the end of the 1980s, a significant proportion of the sales have been due to people replacing their vinyl records. The potential for this market is now largely exhausted, and the industry is wholly reliant on new acts at a time when mainstream music is arguably less varied and more artistically limited than ever.

Moreover, the worldwide fall in sales is uneven. In a number of countries sales rose slightly: these include Russia, which is experiencing its own upgrade cycle at present from cassette to CD, and the UK.

To which we would add that CDs have always been ridiculously overpriced.

It's also obvious from the extent of the fileswapping activity that interest in music has not declined. Perhaps if the industry were willing to re-evaluate how it makes its money, everyone would be better off.

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