In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.
The sharp slide in sales of CDs, which still account for more than 85% of music sold, has far eclipsed the growth in sales of digital downloads, which were supposed to have been the industry's salvation.
The slide stems from the confluence of long-simmering factors that are now feeding off each other, including the demise of specialty music retailers like longtime music mecca Tower Records. About 800 music stores, including Tower's 89 locations, closed in 2006 alone.
Apple Inc.'s sale of around 100 million iPods shows that music remains a powerful force in the lives of consumers. But because of the Internet, those consumers have more ways to obtain music now than they did a decade ago, when walking into a store and buying it was the only option.
Today, popular songs and albums -- and countless lesser-known works -- can be easily found online, in either legal or pirated forms. While the music industry hopes that those songs will be purchased through legal services like Apple's iTunes Store, consumers can often listen to them on MySpace pages or download them free from other sources, such as so-called MP3 blogs.
I think another issue that is driving down CD sales is portability. Over the next 3 days we will be driving about 900 miles during our trip to Monterey and back. In the old days we would have lugged along a stack of CD's for the trip, and since our Explorer can only handle one at a time, every hour or so we'd have to change recordings. For this trip we bought a $20 adapter that allows us to plug any of our iPods into the truck's sound system which gives us instant access to hundreds of CD's and thousands of songs.
The only saving grace for the Southern Gospel Music business that I've been a part of for 33 years is that our customers tend to be older and are not as quick to embrace new technology. We didn't even start offering CD's from my group until 1996 because not that many of our fans had CD players. We've pretty much stopped selling cassettes, with the exception of a discount package of tapes that we sell for those who still use them in their car, but for right now, online downloads aren't much of a threat. Most of the people we deal with do not have iPods or are looking for music online.
In my own house, however, CD sales have definately gone down. Now when my kids want a particular song or album, we usually just buy it off of iTunes and it goes straight on their iPods (or in some cases, all four iPods). It's pretty convenient, not too expensive, and there's no bulky CD cases that have to be stored. Once I got the iPods a couple of years ago, I loaded all my CD's onto the computer and boxed up the CD's and threw them in the garage. As long as the computer continues to work (and I back up the songs every now and then to make sure we don't lose them), I don't need to see the actual CD's at all.
There also an advantage to online purchases if you have an eclectic taste in music. My daughter loves classical music, and there are not many local stores with a good selection of classical CD's. Rather than dig through the meager assortment at Borders, she can go to iTunes, search the name of the piece or composer she wants, and then will usually have several recordings to choose from. Since she's particular about the orchestras she wants to listen to, it's a perfect set-up for her. She downloads the song or album she wants for a few bucks and in a few minutes it's on her iPod.
When I started recording we were still making vinyl LP's and 8-tracks. Cassettes were the new-fangled technology. It just keeps progressing.
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