However awful the message for some readers, isn’t that a beautifully-worded headline from The Wall Street Journal. The venerable newspaper notes that there’s been a 20% fall in CD sales for the first quarter of this year when compared to that of 2006. The rise in digital download sales apparently doesn’t mitigate this decline significantly. Combined physical and digital music sales are down 10%. The article notes a number of contributing factors, not least of which:

• losure of high street vendors (600 closed in US last year)
• Poor quality of contemporary music
• Online piracy
• Downward price pressure exerted by retail chains like WalMart and Best Buy, and
• The poor old MP3 blog.

Here’s my alternative list of reasons for the decline in music sales:

• Ongoing atomisation of music scenes resulting in increasing irrelevance of popular music charts.
• The cumulative weight of popular musical history - five decades and counting - resulting in a more or less conscious sense of cultural exhaustion; witness the popularity of strikingly derivative neo-New Wave groups in recent years.
• The RIAA’s aggressive pursuit of copyright infringers has been terrible PR for the music industry as a whole - they’re now very much the bad guys. This attitude has become a widespread feeling of contempt for the industry as a whole and lazy justification for piracy. (However, there’s always been widespread piracy, ever since the cassette tape became a cheap and easy method of duplication.)
• The tremendous popularity of the iPod has encouraged a consolidation and rediscovery of existing music collections much more than discovery of new music.
• Huge increase in alternative forms of entertainment e.g. DVDs, video games (X-Box, Playstation, Nintendo, etc) and the internet.
• Piracy - okay that’s shared with most other commentators. However it’s my experience that when people take copies of new music they like, they’re also more likely to go to concerts or buy future albums.

TechCrunch has posted about this article and it’s accrued a lengthy debate in the comments. My favourite contribution is this one from someone called Ramon (who unfortunately hasn’t provided a personal URL):This is what is going to happen:

1) Internet becomes ubiquitous in wireless form, especially on mobile devices.
2) Streaming, on-demand music popularity goes up.
3) Providers of streaming, on-demand music begins signing exclusive contracts with artists (”Shakira, only on Yahoo Music; Dashboard Confessional, only on iTunes”)
4) Artists get a cut of the profit (from the subscription costs) based on how many individual listeners are playing their music.
5) Providers of streaming, on-demand music will provide the service that record labels provide now, at a cheaper cost to the consumer, with greater profits to the artist (who is not getting raped on the miniscule % they get off cd sales), and with easier accessibility.
* puts away crystal ball *

Link: Wall Street Journal
Link: TechCrunch

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