Although there has been many record released this year, however it seems no amount of awesome music will fix the music industry’s declining album sales. Billboard and Nielsen Music (formerly Nielsen SoundScan) have released some 2016 mid year sales data on the 6th July 2016 and so far it’s looking quite grim, 2016 is the worst year for overall album sales since Nielsen started to keep track of sales in 1991. Consumers have brought 100.3 million album units – this number includes, digital downloads, CDs and vinyl for the first half of 2016, down 13.6 percent compared to the same time period in 2015.
In the same six months, Listeners stream 208.9 billion songs or 139.2 million album units and according to RIAA and Billboard rules it’s a 58.7 percent increase. Hidden in that number is the boom in music-only streaming: 113.6 billion audio streams, compared to 58.6 billion in 2015. Video streaming like YouTube and Vevo saw a more modest growth: 95.3 billion streams, compared to 2015’s 76.6 billion. Unsurprisingly the report also stated that CD’s continue to decline, with only 40 million units moving in the first six months of 2016, which is a decline of 11.6 percent compared to the same time period last year. However the vinyl collector’s market is still growing, and is up 11.4 percent, but still remains far smaller in terms of actual records: 6.2 million copies sold in the first half of the year.
Looking at percentage, digital album sales are slipping faster than CDs – they are down 18.4 percent to 43.8 million. Only three albums have sold more than one million copies this year and the artist are really no surprise: Drake’s album – ‘Views‘ at 1.3 million album sales, Beyoncé’s Album – ‘Lemonade‘ at 1.2 million album sales and Adele’s Album – ‘25‘ at 1.4 million, the other big seller has been the late great David Bowie’s last album ‘Blackstar‘ is the best-selling vinyl record of the year, shifting 57,000 copies.
The most common place for consumers to purchase albums and songs were, unsurprisingly, at digital retailers, which captured 43.7 percent of the album market, which saw overall sales decline by 18.4 percent, to 43.8 million, but surprisingly “non-traditional” CD retailers, like Amazon and supermarkets, saw an 8.3 percent growth in sales. Streaming is the main culprit in the sales cull, particularly song sales, streaming is definitely booming. For the year, total album consumption which includes TEA, SEA and overall album units – totaled 279.9 million units in the first half of 2016, up 8.9 percent.
The billboard figures don’t really surprise me at all given the last time I physically brought a CD from Sanity or JB Hi-Fi would have to at lest been 5 or more years ago, all my music is now purchased via Google Music and it’s just as competitive as JB Hi-Fi and other retailers if not cheaper most times, so it’s really not that surprising and I would suspect that physical CD sales will keep dropping as streaming albums becomes the new normal.
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