Figures out of Nielsen this week show what we have said all along, that people want to own more music, lots more. Music sales when measured by numbers of tracks are up significantly across the US, measuring this year with last year, with around a 10% hike in track purchases measured by numbers of tracks.
Nielsen points out that around 32% of this music is digital, and that while physical album sales continued to fall, down 14%, online track sales were up 27% to 1,070 million in 2008.
Much of the data comes out of Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks point-of-purchase sales of recorded music, as well as from Nielsen BDS, a music performance monitoring service, and Nielsen RingScan, which tracks mobile ringtone purchases.
UMG is once again the leader in music sales, taking 31.5% of albums sold, and 31.8% of digital tracks sold. Sony-BMG is second with 25.3% of albums, and 23.5% of digital tracks. Sony is followed closely by Warner Music (in the US this is) with EMI down on 9% market share (but it is much stronger in Europe).
Total music purchases in 2008 reached 1.5 billion tracks, marking the fourth consecutive year music sales have exceeded 1 billion and music sales exceeded 65 million in the final week of 2008, making it the biggest sales week in the history of Nielsen SoundScan. However total album sales declined 14% compared to 2007.
Digital Track sales broke the 1 billion mark for the first time and digital album sales reached an all-time high with more than 65 million sales in 2008 up from 50 million in 2007. Digital albums now account for 15% of total album sales compared to 10% in 2007 and 5.5% in 2006.
In the run up to Christmas it was the first time that the Top 5 digital songs all sold more than 300,000 downloads in a week with Lady Gaga’s ‘Just Dance’ selling 419,000. The record for most downloads for a digital song in one week continues to be Flo Rida’s ‘Low’ with sales of 467,000 set during the last week of 2007.
2008 is the first time a digital song broke the 3 million sales mark in a single year. There were 2 songs which achieved this milestone; Leona Lewis’ ‘Bleeding Love’ and Lil Wayne’s ‘Lollipop;’ with sales of 3.4 and 3.2 million respectively.
In 2008, there are 19 different digital songs with sales that exceeded 2 million compared to 9 in 2007.
71 Digital Songs exceed the 1 million sales mark for the year compared to 41 digital songs in 2007, 22 in 2006, and only 2 digital songs in 2005.
All of which would mean that record labels have an underlying increase in shipments, against a backdrop of still falling overall prices (because digital online sales cost less per track). A few more years of this, and the record labels may finally stop complaining about piracy.