How iTunes crushed music sales

The source for the chart is the RIAA (lower left, tiny gray print)? The data may be accurate, they may not, but I'll consider the source. The full article sounds a lot like a puff piece for the poor, beleaguered RIAA. Singles are killing the industry, except that singles drove a lot of the industry for decades. This is briefly mentioned in the article, followed by "but the music industry wised up in the '70s". And wise up they did. Slap a couple of singles on an album, populate the remainder with filler, charge more, profit.<p>"...musicians will have to increasingly rely on touring, merchandise sales and endorsement deals to make up for lost album sales." Yes, yes they will, just like they've always done because of how RIAA members take the large part of the profits from record sales. Again, the only ones for whom anything changes are RIAA members.<p>I just don't see how a shift wouldn't have happened one way or another. Blame iTunes all you want, but it's a hell of a lot better for profits than torrenting. At 99 cents I won't even bother starting the bit torrent client. At $15US for a CD that consists of the two songs I want, and the rest crap, you can bet I'll look at alternatives. And I have disposable income and am not afraid to spend it. You can forget about extracting money from the teenage market at $15US a pop, which will just torrent it when faced with the choice.<p>There's a buggy whip analogy here somewhere, but I'm not going to try. It's the way things are, and it's not going to change no matter how many members of congress the RIAA tries to buy.

If that were sales for your own company's product would you really come to the conclusion that iTunes caused CD sales to drop? Seriously, imagine for a moment it's your business on the line so you'd damn well better get the analysis right: it looks like "my product's" sales dropped off at close to the same rate before and after iTunes even existed.<p>How did iTunes kill music sales if the downward trend started before iTunes was even available (which is plainly on that chart)? What would an honest trendline from the CD sales peak to the trough say about iTunes' impact?<p>iTunes charges a dollar per song, about the same cost/song as Walmart used to charge for a CD in Nebraska back when everyone got in trouble for price gouging, and iTunes takes less of a % than Walmart ever did. If that chart is even close to accurate, Steve Jobs is about 90% of the reason the music industry still exists.<p>Every time I follow a link to CNN I get more convinced that they've given up, and I'm starting to wonder why people bother linking back to these news organizations at all.

&#62;&#62; <i>When adjusted for inflation, revenue has been more than halved since Apple launched the iTunes Music Store.</i><p>Whose revenue? RIAA? What about the artists revenue? It'd be interesting to see that broken down.<p>Here's an interesting infographic showing how much artists make from various sources: <a href="http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/" rel="nofollow">http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music...</a> iTunes is actually less profitable than retail, but only if you're on a label that takes a lions share of what's left after Apple. It'd be interesting to see what independent artists' revenues on iTunes are like.

So you create a graph that maps all music distribution methods until, say, 1999, and then you ignore everything else that happened except iTunes, and blame iTunes.<p>Sure.<p>Remove iTunes from the graph, and what you'll see is a big gaping hole where the next generation music industry product should have been.<p>But more importantly, it shows that said next gen product should have already been in place well before piracy even became a factor and iTunes was just Steve Jobs' wet dream. If anything, it illustrates the utter failure of an industry coasting on the unprecedented success of the CD when everyone else could see that physical carriers were already on the way out.<p>The industry had the time, means and opportunity to shape the download culture. Instead Napster and iTunes did. Not because technology moved so fast, but because the industry stopped moving.

The chart shows a steep decline in CD sales starting in 2000 -- several years <i>before</i> iTunes. So "iTunes crushed sales" like seems a real stretch.<p>A different way of looking at it is that there's a pattern of format changes: vinyl to cassettes to CDs to digital. With the move to digital, unlike the others, there was sigificant downward pressure on prices. So more music is being consumed (on the units chart) at a cheaper prices. From a consumer perspective, this looks like market economics doing what they should :)

They're the ones who built their industry to revolve around hyper-promoted singles.<p>All iTunes did, was let people easily and economically acquire only the tracks they cared about.<p>That those people turned out to not be interested in the 'other 8 songs' or the CD single b-sides is hardly iTunes fault.<p>If the industry promoted <i>albums</i> and <i>bands</i>, maybe they'd get different results.

It's almost like... people don't like shitty garbage that fills most albums...

Candid question: Volumes doubled and overall revenue got divided by 3 in 10 years. Is music 6 times cheaper than it was back then?

I would like to see a few different charts:<p>1. Total number of distinct songs sold. and 2. Total length of distinct music tracks.<p>If we assume that a CD consists of ten 3 minute songs (30 minutes) we can see how much effort the "artists" put in to recording their songs [that were sold, due to being included on the CDs] to the revenue generated vs single tracks. I wonder this because if artists could focus on playing gigs, finding the popular songs and only spending effort and time recording those songs and digitizing them for sale, then the revenue per hour of effort could result in a drastically better "hourly rate" for recording.<p>(There's nothing like "doing work" just to do work and have it "thrown away". Many developers know this feeling.)<p>EDIT: I hope you can see where I am trying to go. I want to compare distinct songs sold to sales and aggregated distinct song length to sales. Perhaps someone can elaborate and better communicate what I'm trying to say.

I'd love to see arrows indicating dates when Napster, Kazaa, and Pirate Bay all began to achieve strong adoption rates. My music purchasing behavioral changes had nothing to do with iTunes..<p>I was a very happy Lala user until Apple killed it, and am now happy to pay $10/month to Spotify.

Already clearly peaked and in decline 4 years before itunes launched, presumably due to piracy.

So, most people agree that the point of music copyrights is to incentivize the creation of music.[1] Has there been a steep decline in the amount of music created since 2005 compared to the heyday of CDs, 1995-2005? Putting aside arguments along the lines of "pop music these days is so much worse than pop music when I was a teenager", is there any serious argument that music is of lower quality?<p>If not, shouldn't this be an argument for a reduction in copyright strength?<p>[1] Occasionally people argue that copyright protects the artists <i>moral</i> rights to the music, regardless of societal impact, but let's ignore that minority opinion.

This article is pretty funny when you look at all the subtle statements and think about what they actually mean.<p>"The smaller, cheaper "45" record dominated music in the 1950s and '60s, but the music industry wised up in the '70s."<p>This means, 45's were very popular and then the record industry purposely killed them to sell consumers more expensive full albums just to get a copy of the same song.<p>So the music industry were ripping people off, and the advent of piracy/digital downloads means they can do longer do that.<p>Interesting biased article. Needs a proper translation though from RIAA-speak to real English.

This chart could use some piracy (and online streaming) data as well, though I am not sure what it would look like.<p>Also, make sure to sort by sales too.

I'd like to point out that this curve seems to follow the economy almost perfectly with a climb until the late 90s, and then the economic slowdown of the 00s into the 'Great Recession'.<p>So, as we always say 'correlation doesn't mean causation'. iTunes probably isn't the cause, the severe decline in disposable income was the most likely factor.

The article is fairly insane. The "sales" chart (the chart defaults to "units") clearly shows sales peaking several years before iTunes was released, and the decline continues (but slows slightly) after iTunes was released.<p>How does one look at that and conclude that iTunes "crushed music sales?"

Only iTunes? Might be missing a few other changes in revenue.<p>What percentage of a CD sale went to the artist?<p>It's not really about a change in format but a change in a distribution model. Anything that reduces the amount of middle men is good for the consumer and the artist.

(As I've said before...) To paraphrase Jack Valenti: the future is to the past as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone, with the windows open, listening to her favorite DRM-free digital audio files. Don't blame iTunes for successfully serving the market.

Why did the music industry allow iTunes to sell singles instead of entire albums? If illegal torrents forced them to do it, wouldn't a better title be, "How Illegal Downloads Crushed Music Sales"?

well...it IS a chart by Time Warner...that comes directly from RIAA

Why do musicians keep churning out albums where listeners don't care about most of tracks? Even when that clearly doesn't work?<p>That's stupid. Most music I care about comes in albums where most of tracks fit my tastes and touch my soul.<p>I wonder how the album:single chart will look like if we subtract "whatever plays on radio" from it.

Leaving out live events, streaming, satellite, etc makes this a joke of a chart.<p>Spending has shifted, and how people enjoy music has shifted.<p>It'd be like claiming the VHS killed the drive-in movie business. That'd be wildly confusing what was actually going on in the market at the time by ignoring a lot of other data points.<p>Tell Madonna her album sales have been decimated. Oh wait, she's busy making tens of millions per tour with $150 tickets. This chart pretends none of that spending is occurring. People have a finite budget for music, as with anything.

i guess in 2013 iTunes overtook piracy in crushing the music industry because I see one of those articles every year, what exactly isn't crushing the music industry?

Interesting how sales revenue is reportedly down so much that vinyl, which is a fraction of a percent by 2000, grows to a visible percentage point or so by today. Cassettes, alas, never had a revival