Music Sales Plummeted During Previous Decade

As far as I’m concerned, music is one of the best inventions ever. It can pump you up, mellow you out, cheer you up or bring back old memories. I think it goes without saying that music is a big part of most of our lives, but if you were to judge that by music sales trends, you might begin to think that there’s a downward spiral in effect, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

In 1999, known as the year the original Napster was introduced, music sales began to decline. We’re not talking about digital sales taking over CD sales, but sales in general. In 1999, the music revenue was around $14.6 billion. The end of 2009? That number shrunk to $6.3 billion. That’s not just half… that’s more like a 60% plummet. As someone who regularly purchases music, both as a hard CD or digitally, numbers like these are depressing.

The major drop has been attributed to a couple of things, and it’s not just piracy. But, I doubt anyone will disagree that piracy has had a major effect on things. Sadly, I still know a lot of people who prefer to download music (and also movies) than would rather pay for it. And a lot of them have great jobs as well, so if that doesn’t give a general idea as to the mentality of the common consumer, I’m not sure what would.

The other problem is of course the recession, which hasn’t only affected music sales, but everything else as well. But as much as I’d like to blame these two things exclusively, I also have to wonder if music television is also hurting the sales. There’s a problem I clued into the other day, so hear me out.

When was the last time MTV was actually MTV? Earlier today, I turned my TV to both MTV and MTV2, and guess what? No music. Rather, the channels were showing some teenage drama on one, and what I believe was a reality show on the other (I didn’t watch too long since those shows usually induce insta-vomiting). It’s not just MTV, though. Up in Canada, Much Music has been slowly turning into an MTV, showing more TV shows than actual music. Isn’t it strange that both of these channels have music in their names?

To be fair, Much Music offers specialty channels for music, such as Much Vibe (R&B), Much Loud (punk and metal) and Much Punch (mainstream), but the keyword here is “specialty”. It means you need to pay upwards of a dollar or two more per month for each channel, or upgrade your cable package to include them. It’s easy to understand that a lot of people don’t take this route, so overall, their exposure to new music has been going down throughout the last decade.

I could be wrong, but regardless of whether I am or not, there’s a definite decline, and it’s too bad.

In the time between Napster’s shuttering and iTunes’ debut, many of Napster’s 60 million users found other online file sharing techniques to get music for free. Even after iTunes got people buying music tracks for just 99 cents, it wasn’t as attractive as free. “That four-year lag is where the music industry lost the battle,” said Sonal Gandhi, music analyst with Forrester Research. “They lost an opportunity to take consumers’ new behavior and really monetize it in a way that nipped the free music expectation in the bud.”