Online Music Sales Exceeded $6 Billion a Year

While entertainment industry keeps complaining that Internet music is harming the business, online music sales continue to increase by almost half a billion dollars annually. However, the expectations are that they won’t overtake CD sales until the end of decade.

According to recent statistics, worldwide revenues for Internet music sales are expected to reach $6.3 billion in 2011, which is almost half a million more than the 2010 results. This trend is predicted to continue with estimated $6.8 billion in 2012 until finally hitting $7.7 billion in 2015. These figures mean that industry business models begin taking Internet music into consideration, after ten years since Napster emerged online, before much burying of heads in sand by the music industry.

Today the industry won’t see those ridiculous profits for the music industry that it had obtained from the overpriced CDs – earlier, it could see shelling out the best part of $30 on a disc, but the tendency is fast fading. Instead, more and more people receive access to electronic devices on which they can listen to tracks digitally. Whether the fashion is about MP3 players or smartphones, CD sales will undoubtedly continue to spiral downwards.

Consequently, the industry observers expect further drops to profits from CD sales – for instance, revenues of $15 billion are predicted to sink to $10 billion over 5 years from 2010 to 2015. In other words, CDs will actually represent the majority of cash earned by music labels up to the end of this decade, pretty much time after file downloading started to become popular.

In a number of areas this is expected to happen in the nearest future, in others – a bit later. For example, in the United States the online music market has almost reached maturity, and currently features online growth in the double digits levelling off. As for the future, this growth is predicted to stay flat. The same is observed in Western Europe and Japan, while regions like Latin America and the Middle East picking up on Internet music more slowly.

In most cases increases in revenue are stipulated by the rise of subscription based services like Spotify. Despite the fact that such websites can’t offer much in terms of remuneration to musicians and labels, they are still quickly growing in terms of funding the music industry.

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FeCoola said:

I honestly think all of this will be replaced by Spotify

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kill dank said:

Oh, and illegal downloading hurts them so bad.

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Duly said:

Im a weird one, i download something illegally and if i like it ill go out and buy it...

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