Germany's recorded music industry continues decline, downloads popular but not making up shortfall
In a statistic-laden article, Billboard takes a look at the current state of the German recorded music industry, reporting that sales of all types of recorded music continued to decline for the tenth consecutive year.
Germany is the EU’s biggest market, so it tends to provide a decent indication of trends in the music industry.
Despite many who see the CD as unfashionable, and on the way out, it still accounted for over four-fifths of revenue.
Official singles dropped by over 30% in sales volume, though sales of single track downloads rose by nearly 40%. Mobile downloads suffered, and overall downloads still didn’t make up for the loss of sales of physical formats.
Sales of music video DVDs also continued to decline.
The article makes no attempt at reasoning why sales continue to decline, though it’s not hard to speculate. Illegal downloading and peer-to-peer sharing of music must have something to do with it, possibly with a rise in legal music streaming services.
In any case, the CD is certainly not dead yet, though online competition is only set to increase.
(Via Billboard)
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