The Grauniad carries a story about how the BPI (nasty flash intro alert) is trying to stuff the bad news about plummeting singles sales back into the sack:
Record industry bosses have been trying to delay the announcement of the biggest ever drop in singles sales to avoid bad publicity in advance of the Brit Awards.
Figures seen by the Guardian show a one-third decline in sales, from 52.5m in 2002 to 35.9m last year. The drop is mirrored by a “disturbing” increase in illegal in ternet downloads. But albums continue to rise in popularity, which means the total value of record sales remained steady.
A very simple reason for this, methinks – the average album price is somewhere around the £10 – £12 mark and carries 10 – 12 tracks, more if you’re lucky. The average single will set you back £4.99 or so, and contains maybe 4 tracks, most of which will be remixes of the original. Ergo, album = reasonable value, single = poor value. Add to this thata single is directly replaceable by a single MP3 download, and it’s not suprising that sales have fallen off a cliff.
But notice this bit:
But albums continue to rise in popularity, which means the total value of record sales remained steady.
How does that stack up with the “downloading is killing music” argument?
