Research: Changes to the Music Industry.

I have done some additional research into the decreasing popularity of physical album sales, and the increase in digital single downloads, as part of my research for the digi-pak task and CD magazine advertisement.

I found that there has been an increase in the popularity and importance of single download sales which has undermined the need for physical album purchases.

 Changes to the Music Industry.

There has been a fairly significant decrease in the number of album sales in recent years, both in physical sales and more recently in digital album sales. Factors such as problems such as the on-going recession are factors likely to be causing this decrease- with people choosing to not prioritise music buying; however there are other factors such as an increase in a desire for single collections as opposed to album’s. This has resulted in artists focusing more on promoting single releases rather than prioritising album promotion, as the music industry is going through a change that has created the image that the chart positions of singles are becoming as important as the chart positions and sales of the artists album.

With this change, the consistent good quality of songs on an album is becoming les regular as there are often 3 or 4 really good songs, with additional ‘filler’ songs, due to artists realising the popularity of single downloads as opposed to album downloads as a whole, which is further decreasing the popularity of albums.

The image below is a chart of CD sales, and album & single downloads in the U.S up to 2009, with predictions of the following years. As the image shows; in 2009 Album downloads were at 76,163 sales and predicted to increase slightly, whereas Cd sales were slightly higher at 295,237 but sales were expected to decrease, and in 2009 single download sales were increasing on 1,159,174.

(The graph and some information is from this article.. http://www.fastcompany.com/1672447/the-state-of-internet-music-on-youtube-pandora-itunes-and-facebook)

The influence of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube

With the popularity of social networking sites such as twitter and Facebook increasing significantly in the last few years, many artists popularity is measured on the amount of followers or 'likes' as an indication of how many fans the artist has.

Artist such as Lady Gaga, who has 450,551,445 views on her YouTube video of Bad Romance, as well as having nearly 200 million followers on Twitter, and being the most ‘liked’ artist on Facebook; are all statistics that imply the immense success of Lady Gaga.  

There has also been a change in the way music video's are being premiered for the first time. In previous years new video's were premiered on television music channels- with channels such as MTV having the exclusive 'first play'. However, many new music video's are now premiered on YouTube or VeVo, as well as on the Artists own website; Which also shows the change in promotion strategies.