Digital Music Sales Overtake Physical

Published on Thursday, 16 February 2012 10:55

	By Charles Mahoney Follow @_AsktheExperts_

After many a prediction that it would happen, digital downloads have finally surpassed physical music sales in the US.

Nielsen and Billboard’s recent report shows that 50.3% of music purchases in 2011 were digital: an increase of 8.4% from 2010. Physical sales, on the other hand, appeared to have taken a 5% decrease.

The change comes more than ten years after the launch of the iPod: an invention that Steve Jobs quite rightly predicted as revolutionising the industry. Its transformation from a trendy gadget to the definitive portable media player naturally saw a rise in the popularity of the iTunes store and a colossal expansion of its catalogue, which in turn had an essential part to play in the way that many people choose to build their collections. Advances in phone technology have also made a real impact, as customers now have the ability to purchase music wherever they have internet access.

This breakthrough may not be quite as disastrous as some of the more outspoken detractors believe, however. It comes as little surprise to see that Adele’s 21 was the biggest selling release of last year (even if it seemed as if fans could have just as easily heard the entire thing being played constantly on every radio station in existence), but such was the gargantuan nature of its success that album sales in general were revitalised: a real challenge to claims that the digital market would be cataclysmic to the concept of buying records as a whole.

Nor are things entirely doom and gloom for the physical market. Despite only accounting for 1.2% of all of last year’s music sales, the vinyl resurgence continued with a huge increase from 2.8m sales in 2010 to 3.9m in 2011. This perhaps indicates that rather than physical music being rendered obsolete on the whole, it is instead the compact disc in particular that no longer compels consumers to part with their cash.

Yet this has failed to assuage the concerns of traditionalists. Over the last few weeks, legendary singer-songwriter Neil Young has made his feelings clear about the disservice inflicted upon the work of musicians by the prominence of the digital age, stating that ‘it isn’t doing justice to the art’. Rather than holding a fundamental resentment to the existence of such a market, however, Young’s vexation stems from the way in which digital files are not being used to capture the full quality of the artist’s output. ‘The MP3 only has five percent of the data present in the original recording’, he told MTV News.

Speaking at an industry conference, the Canadian also declared that he and Steve Jobs had been in discussions over the creation of a new device capable of playing high-resolution audio.  Details were sketchy, with the implication that that there has been no movement on the project since the Apple CEO’s passing last October, although it was made clear that Jobs held similar views. ‘Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, but when he went home he listened to vinyl,’ declared Young.

Such a revelation quite understandably silenced the room. Chances are that we’ll never know just how true that claim actually is, but it remains to be seen whether the radical development of the now all-conquering digital music market proposed by Neil Young does in fact take place.