French Music Sales Plummet

Although a decline in recorded music revenue is pretty much par for the course by this point, France was hit particularly hard with a 7% drop in 2015, and although streaming was up, it was hardly enough to counteract overall plummeting sales.

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Guest Post by Mark Mulligan on his Music Industry Blog

2015 was another year of mixed fortunes for the music industry, with Nordic markets showing positive signs (again) while some bigger markets struggle. It is in this context that French music industry trade body SNEP announced that the French recorded music market registered a whopping 7% decline in 2015, which followed hot on the heels of another 7% decline in 2014. The net result is that France’s recorded music market is now 67% smaller than it was in 2000. To give an extra sense of perspective, if the French market had declined by the same €32 million in 2001 that it did in 2015, the market would have reduced by just 2%. Streaming revenues were up an impressive 47% but physical sales fell by 16% and downloads by a staggering 21%.Streaming is an increasingly important part of the mix but it is still a minority player, increasing its market share from 16% in 2014 to 24% in 2015. Even though the download collapse was seismic, the lost revenue (€12.7 million) was less than half the amount that streaming grew by (€33.2). So however much streaming may be cannibalising downloads (and it is) it is adding more than it is taking, in France anyway. But we are not just experiencing one format transition, the CD is dying off too. So when you add the decline in download sales and physical sales together, the total (€64.3 million) is nearly double what streaming added. The recorded music business is switching from a sales model to an access model but the revenue transition is lagging the behavioural shift.

Perhaps most perplexing though was the fact that ad supported streaming revenue, for both audio and video, declined by 8%. As regular readers will know, I have long advocated that free streaming should move towards a Pandora like model and away from full on demand. Now the revenue story is building to support this case.Back in October we published our MIDiA Research music forecasts report ‘Global Music Forecasts 2015-2020: Declining Legacy Formats Cancel Out Streaming Growth’ (from which the above chart is taken and which you can buy here). We predicted that the continued decline of legacy formats (i.e. the download and the CD) would undo all the positive growth work of streaming resulting in market stagnation / market decline. As the French experience shows us, this reality is already coming to pass.