Billboard magazine reports this morning that album sales are reaching historic lows. According to Billboard, “U.S. album sales have hit new historic lows over the last five weeks marking the longest consecutive stretch in the SoundScan era that the industry has gone without scanning more than 5 million units.” To make matters worse, even sales of singles downloads are down 2.3% from last year.
There are a lot of possible reasons for the dip in sales: Pricing of singles, which have slowly increased from $0.99 to $1.29, has likely been a culprit, as has the increase in usage of streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora and even use of YouTube as a means of discovering and listening to music. And it could also simply be a matter of the quality of releases and their appeal to various demographics. One of the sadder notes is that, while online store like iTunes and Amazon continue to increase in popularity (sales up 6%), independent and other physical retail stores continue to show double-digit reductions.
The best selling album of the year is Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience with just over 2 million albums sold.
Why do you think sales continue to slip?
Read our opinion piece on drops in R&B music sales
.