Album sales continue to fall despite a 24% rise in digital album downloads in 2011, against “a backdrop of chronic piracy”, says the BPI.
Why do I get the feeling that this is unexpected by some? It’s 2012. As unfortunate as it sounds, but CDs are on the way out and have been so for a long time.
I think this is much bigger than the issue of a “dying” format. It’s about the concept of the album and how people are choosing to consume music. A 24% increase in digital album sales sounds like good news to me, especially considering that buying digitally has generally favoured singles (from the same article, “sales of singles rose for the fourth successive year to 177.9 million copies, versus 86.6 million in 2007. Digital copies accounted for 98% of the sales.”). I certainly don’t want to see the end of the album but I am struggling to see how artists and labels will be able to justify the cost in the future if album sales do keep declining year after year.
(Source: BBC)
