The Music Industry Is Finally Turning Around ...

The Recording Industry Association of America just released its 2011 sales figures yesterday (PDF here), and there was a surprising bit of good news in them.Total U.S. music sales actually grew for the first time since 2004. They were up 0.2%, just topping $7 billion. The reason: digital sales were up 9.2% during the year, and physical sales (mostly CDs) dropped only 7.7%, which is smaller than in recent years.Digital made up more than half of revenues for the first time ever.

There were some other interesting notes as well:

• Subscription service revenue is growing. The take from services like Spotify and Rhapsody was up almost 14% to $241 million. Total subscribers grew from 1.5 million to 1.8 million.

• Album downloads are growing like crazy -- unit sales (105 million) and revenue ($1 billion) were both up over 20%.

• CDs are still the biggest seller by far, with more than 240 million sold for more than $3.1 billion.

• People spent more than $100 million on vinyl records last year. Unit sales and revenues were both up over 30%.

Here's the full set of stats:

Source 

businessinsider.com

Posted 03/2012

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