Didn't take long, did it?. It would seem that the rapid growth of digital download sales has already begun to slow down. In a year that saw even more music download services added to the marketplace, growth was down on the previous year. The worst news is that the boom years somehow coincided with a recession that was supposed to be the lowest points: so as the economy has recovered, digital music sales haven't grown as we'd expect them too. Growth in 2010 was just 6%. Considering that the year on year trend is downward - 25% in 2008, 12% in 2009 - it's starting to look a lot like digital distribution won't be outright replacing existing revenue streams. None of this is to say that the music download isn't a valid revenue stream: it currently accounts for 29% of production music company revenue. But this change was never assured of being the one-size fits all solution for commercial music.
As they are, digital downloads are based on ideals as outmoded as the physical mediums they aim to replace. Audiophiles, enthusiasts and businesses after music for advertising aren't really tempted to download music from the download services. This isn't necessarily because such users wish to amass massive physical collections of music, though this is obviously of interest to many. The problem lies in the mainstream adoption of mp3 and mpeg-4 based 'lossy' formats. In short, the internet is a lot quicker than it was when these file formats came to prominence. Mp3 was the darling of the early (and illegal) music download scene because users could neither afford the hard-disk space nor the download time that a larger file would require in the days of the 56k modem. But we now live in an age where entire movies come at us faster than we can play them back, so why are we limiting our audio?.
The latest industry numnbers come to use via the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry. In their annual press-release, they inevitably finger piracy as the biggest threat to the music industry. Not to say they're wrong, but the cause of piracy isn't correctly attributed. The fact of the matter is that not everyone wants to consume their music in a faux-record store, as if the end product had some kind of resemblance to the physical product. Music downloads should stop trying to be the successor to CDs: they're the successor to Radio, or MTV. Consider how Music for video is a completely viable way of exploiting the music catalogue. Don't want to rely on fickle advertising revenues? Take a look at the Spotify model. Accept that people want subscription based services, not products presented as if they actually existed.
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