Growing Anxiety Over Shrinking Digital Music Sales
Remember when CD sales started to go off a cliff? “Don’t worry,” analysts said, “Sales of digital tracks are growing exponentially. It’s just a matter of time before they make up the difference.”
But here we are at the end of 2013 and those predictions have not come true. In fact, digital sales–albums and individual tracks–are slowing. In the US, fewer digital tracks were sold in 2013 than in 2012. What’s happening? Music streaming services, for one. FastCoLabs takes a look.
Spotify, the frontrunner in the growing all-you-can-stream music subscription space, is already the source of ongoing controversy within the music industry. With the news that paid downloads are starting to erode, the anti-streaming rhetoric will likely heat up even further. That’s because of longstanding anxieties over the economic viability of the streaming model and whether or not artists can get a fair payout from the arrangement.
Keep reading here. You’ll see why stakeholders in the Canadian music industry aren’t interested in rolling over for companies like Spotify and Pandora.
