5 with 56,000) and Jake Owen’s Barefoot Blue Jean Night (No. 2 with 228,000), David Guetta’s Nothing But the Beat (No. The week also saw the top 10 debut of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ I’m With You (No. 29, it sold 964,000 copies and gave Lil Wayne his third career chart-topper on the Billboard 200 chart, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Even though the album leaked on the Internet days before its release Aug. Big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy account for up to 65 percent of all retail purchases, and many of those stores are sharply reducing the floor space allotted to music, said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Pali Research in New York.(USA Today) –Lil Wayne’s long-anticipated Tha Carter IV made its debut with sales that can be attributed to brand loyalty and a well-timed marketing plan. About 84 percent of all album purchases were CDs, down from 90 percent the year before.Īnd since CDs remain the record industry's biggest profit engine, many analysts worry that the industry will be particularly vulnerable to inventory reductions at retail stores. But those types of contract are still far from the norm.ĭespite the growth of online music sales, CDs remain by far the most popular format, although that hold is slipping 361 million CDs were sold in 2008, down almost 20 percent from the previous year. The record industry has been eager to share in touring's bull market, and many of the major labels' new contracts are for so-called 360 deals, which give the company a much wider share in an artist's income, from touring to merchandising to product endorsements. But in keeping with the trend of recent years, slightly fewer tickets were sold for more money: Attendance for the top 100 tours dropped 3 percent, but the average ticket price climbed 8 percent, to $66.90. Ticket sales in North America in 2008 rose at least 7 percent, to $4.2 billion, according to Pollstar, the touring-industry trade magazine.
But à la carte downloads are also far less lucrative than full CDs.Īt least one sector of the music industry has continued to enjoy robust success: the concert business. AC/DC has said that selling individual tracks breaks up the continuity of a full album.
Neither act sells its music through Apple's iTunes, the dominant online seller.
Kid Rock's "Rock n Roll Jesus" reached No.4 with just over two million sales, and AC/DC's "Black Ice," sold through an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart, was No.5 with 1.92 million. "We look at the total consolidated revenue from dozens of revenue lines behind a given artist or project, which include digital sales, the physical business, mobile sales and licensing income."Įven as most of the industry pushes for greater online sales, two of the biggest albums of the year were by artists who have been vocal opponents of downloading. "We don't focus anymore on total album sales or the sale of any one particular product as the metric of revenue or success," Caraeff said. Twenty percent of Rihanna's income, he said, has come from the sale of ring tones. Rio Caraeff, the executive vice president of eLabs, the digital division of Universal Music Group, said other income, like the fees collected when users stream a video online, had become an essential revenue. Record companies counter that album sales alone do not give a full picture of the complex new economics of the industry. Gartner recently issued a report urging record companies to put their primary focus on downloads. "But do we get back to where the revenue that the labels see is going to be fully replacing the CD in the next four to five years? No." "As the digital side grows, you get a different business model, with more revenue streams," said Michael McGuire, an analyst with Gartner, a market research firm. Just over a billion songs were downloaded, a 27 percent increase from 2007, and some record companies say they are finally beginning to wring significant profit from music on Web sites like YouTube and MySpace.īut analysts say that despite the growth and promise of digital music - in 2003 just 19 million songs were purchased as downloads - the money made online is still far from enough to make up for losses in physical sales. Sales of digital music continued to soar last year. "Tha Carter III" is the first release in SoundScan's 17-year history to top the year-end list with sales of less than three million.
The music industry has grown accustomed to dismal sales numbers, and this year even the good news comes with disappointment.