Member Since: 8/19/2013
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Album sales hit a new low
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The market for albums continues to recede, following a (now) long-standing trend that has been accelerated by streaming's success.
As streaming gathers momentum, the U.S. music industry keeps breaking sales milestones -- the wrong kind.
This week's 3.97-million album sales tally is the smallest weekly sum for album sales since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking data in 1991. It's also the first time weekly sales have fallen below four million in that time span.
Larger retailers and CDs, vestiges of an older record business, have been hit the hardest. Through August 24th, CD sales are down 19.2 percent year-over-year while sales at mass merchants and chains have fallen 23 percent and 25.6 percent, respectively.
Record label sales executives are not surprised by the latest downturn. "Sales have been going in the wrong direction all year," says one label sales head. "I guess its overdue, when you look at [the growth of streaming]." This year, label executives finally conceded something there were reluctant to acknowledge last year: Streaming is cannibalizing digital sales.
Last year, when Billboard covered the then-historic lows in album sales last August, weekly sales had dipped below 5 million units for five weeks in a row. Weekly sales fared even worse in the following weeks, falling under five million units in 10 of the next 13 weeks. There was even another five-week run of below-five-million weekly sales from early October to early November.
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