What to know why Digital Music sales decreased in 2013. Check your kids phones.

According to Nielsen SoundScan.digital track sales fell 5.7% from 1.34 billion units to 1.26 billion units while digital album sales fell 0.1% to 117.6 million units from the previous year’s total of 117.7 million, as reported by Ed Christman in Billboard recent bulletin .

Digital Music Sales Decrease For First Time in 2013

I'll let that sink in for all of your digital only philosophers.  Ed further reported that the vinyl is now
2% of album sales in the U.S; digital albums comprise 40.6% and the CD is 57.2% and cassettes and DVDs 0.2%.

So the Music Biz ain't at 50/50 yet and for anyone that understand MATH physical is 60 percent of the Market.  Yet just about every new label formed since the advent of what ever that company was called thinks way too much about digital only strategy as the future while forgetting about today.  Let's be clear about the strength of CD still.  Next time you're inline at Starbucks or Whole foods, 7-11 or any service station driving down the road. Just look around.  All of them have CD within eye shot of the Cash registers.

Thus solving the riddle of why CD players are still in most Automobiles

I'll also directly respond to Ed's question is streaming taking from Digital Sales. when we look at our statements from #AltaArtists from the various services the streaming payouts are in the 10s of dollars sometimes only cents. Yet the companies are now worth billions?  Yes there is something very wrong here in Digital Denmark.  BTW why wouldn't anyone expect that to be the case.

Think of it this way. If you're not married to the idea that quality is better than rapidly you'll already jumped the sound shark and now it's about getting it NOW.  So you can log in to iTunes, what the pwd? do I have money, is my credit card working? Really I have to use my Mom's account?  Or you can steam it. Often for free, with ads, unless it's bittorrent/etc and no ones the wisers.

Now lets' be clear there was a winner in 2013 and that was the streaming services that yanked the wallet out from under iTunes. So what is the industry going to do about it.   I know at my company we're going to be making a very strong statement in 2014 about the Future of Entertainment Today and I hope that others are going to start to take a Clicks to Bricks Distribution Strategy in 2014.

BTW these same kids streaming are the ones buying Vinyl, Cassettes and yes CD's.  They're a fickle bunch and since they don't understand themselves it's gonna be harder to for us to understand them. However the one thing that remains supreme is Entertainment needs to cater to the AltaFans and they want it Digital and Physical.

Beyonce was a one time stunt get over it.

Before this Beyonce ordeal gets out of hand,  this is the 1st (and probably the last) successful stunt release. There are only a handful of artists that are internationally known by a single name who have the ability/ego to even attempt this...so while people are talking about it as a major stunt, others will try this approach. The problem with that route is there is more to doing a digital only release than what meets the eye.

 I put up one of the first digital distribution outlets on the internet starting as ~Altavoz moving to Altavoz.com in May of 1995.

There's a shrinking number of people that have been on the Internetwork let alone attempting to be a digital distributor longer than I have had the privilege to.  

The one thing that most don't know is that itunes in the USA doesn't fully represent what the rest of the world can purchase.  To attempt to have your music distributed worldwide, you have to have a relationship with the various territories of iTunes. On top of that hurdle, each of the iTunes territories has a different criteria for releasing a song.  To do this, you either need to get to the distributor of that artists digital content (definitely under a contract) or bypass them. Again, only internationally recognized single named artists are heffed up enough to try this route, but the fools will follow.

There is one fickle thing about our business that drives people crazy, and that is we have a quirky reporting system. This system definitely ain't perfect, however, the success of this system is ultimately for the 99.1 percent of recording artists who are selling digital and physical copies of their releases. Despite what all of my older friends want to believe physical outsells digital 2 to 1. The success of this release just got a bit rougher for said internationally known artist as the number one retailer of music said...

"Talk to the Hand Queen B." AKA, we ain't carrying it.  

Now that she just snubbed the entire ecosystem of music stores and every partner channels (save the one that sells music to sell hardware) the final year end count is still out; so calling this a success based on her past sales, we'll all have to wait to see....

PS