Album sales up slightly last year

[Miguel]

Full Album Sales Showed a Little Growth in 2011



For the beleaguered music industry, any positive news about sales is cause for celebration. And in 2011, the numbers were slightly up.

Sales of complete albums, the industry’s most profitable product, reached 330.6 million in the United States last year, a 1.3 percent increase from 2010, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which collects sales data from retailers. Some businesses might call that level of growth flat, but since album sales had fallen every year since 2004, it was a notable improvement.

Some of that marginal growth came from one album, Adele’s “21” (XL/Columbia) which sold 5.82 million copies, the best one-year sales count for any album since Usher’s “Confessions” sold 7.98 million copies in 2004.

The increases were largely driven by consumption of digital music, whose growth quickened last year after a slow 2010. Last year 1.27 billion individual tracks were downloaded in the United States, up 8.5 percent from the year before, and sales of complete digital albums reached 103.1 million, a 19.5 percent gain from 2010.

...For the first time, digital music purchases surpassed those of physical albums like CDs and vinyl records: 50.3 percent of all units sold — whether singles or full albums — were digital, according to SoundScan.

...Adele, 23, a British retro-soul singer, has a straightforward style that is at odds with the electronic dance-pop that dominates the Top 40, yet her songs “Rolling in the Deep” and “Someone Like You” became hits on multiple radio formats. That helped her album, released in February, remain one of the Top five sellers for almost every week of the year.

Mr. Stringer attributed Adele’s success to the quality of her music, to a marketing plan that made use of all the modern tools like social media, and strategically chosen placements in film and television. Yet the label avoided the excessive branding deals and product endorsements that could have turned her fans off.

“We were omnipresent but not overexposed,” Mr. Stringer said.

I bet they regard Haley's performance of Rolling in the Deep as one of those "strategically chosen placements in film and television."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/busine...ndex.jsonp

[john]

Vinyl record sales hit an 18-year high [in UK]

...Sales have been driven primarily by the Arctic Monkeys (whose LP AM is the biggest selling vinyl of 2014), Jack White and Pink Floyd, with Oasis, Status Quo and David Bowie also contributing to the impressive figures.

...Whether because of an older demographic continuing to top-up their collections, or the younger generation's obsession with nostalgia and retro goods, there's no denying a resurgence of the record – although it's still a niche and relatively small part of the industry, with vinyl accounting for only 2% of the UK music market.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2014-11-2...-year-high