The Year in Music Sales: Vinyl and streaming up; Everything else down

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has issued its annual report of music sales for 2013, and it shows clearly where the industry is heading: Streaming music services like Pandora, Spotify and Beats Music. Those services grew over 50% during the year and now account for over 1/5th of all music revenue.

It was another tough year for CDs sales, which were down 14%, and also disappointing for mp3 downloads, which decreased 1%.  Downloads are still the most popular music format, but don’t expect that to last.

Vinyl albums continue to be the “little engine that could,” growing 31% during 2013. Consumers bought almost 10 million vinyl LPs during the year, an astonishing number that almost no one would have predicted just a few years ago.

So where are we headed? There is an entire generation of young music listeners who don’t have their parents’ desire to own their music. They’re fine just listening to music owned by someone else. For several years they accomplished that through illegal file sharing, but now they can do it legally and for free through Pandora or Spotify or for a low monthly subscription to premium streaming services.  And some of their parents are changing their habits, too. Expect streaming services to dominate the musical landscape in the not-too-distant future. True audiophiles will continue to support CDs and vinyl, but, unless there is a dramatic sea change, by 2020 most of us will be listening to our music over the internet.

By Chris Rizik

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