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Graphic Proof Of The Death Of The Album

People still love music and many are willing to pay for it.  But what they are buying is shifting dramatically. Ars Technica created these simple graphics which show the decline of the album vs. the growth in singles sales  Both are reports of unit sales:

image from origin.static.arstechnica.com TuneCore 2008 Digital Music Distribution Data

image from origin.static.arstechnica.com

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7 Comments

  1. Sigh. Please update these charts to include estimated revenue derived from each unit.

  2. This is graphic proof that Ars misunderstands the issue. Those graphs are very misleading and poorly done. There need to be two fixes: include CD sales, and show either revenue or total songs sold.
    The album format generates 3.3 times more revenue than single track sales (according to my back of the envelope calculations). In terms of total tracks sold, if you use 11 tracks per album (to be conservative) you find that album sales result in 4.5 times more song sales than individual track sales.
    As you can see, the album format accounts for far more revenue and far more of purchased music than single track sales. Looking at only digital unit sales gives a very warped image of reality.

  3. An important thing to note is that iTunes, where the bulk of a record label’s digital revenue would come from, reports sales of albums with ten or fewer tracks as track sales, not as an album sale. This will skew the track revenue upward and album sales downward.

  4. There seems to be a bit of hyperbole here. The figures assume an album is equivalent to a single, which Glenn and I believe No are getting at. Also, in the description it mentions the singles bought, in the graph it’s just songs. Which one is it? The official singles or just single song purchases? Is this corrected for a user who later purchases the rest of album? Does this happen frequently? Far from definitive, but it does show a trend that the majority of music consumption occurs in short artist-attention deficit.

  5. I saw the limitations of the charts when I re-published them. But do they not also illustrate an over all trend towards single purchases and does that not imply lost revenue?
    In others words, as statistical proof, they are of limited value, but as another example of a shifting marketplace they are illustative. 5 years ago single sales were barely a blip on the sales charts compared to albums.

  6. True, 5 years ago single sales were virtually non-existent. On the other hand, 50 years ago, albums were often understood as collections of existing singles (see: the Beatles’ early albums, and their difference between UK version and US version).
    Personally, I believe that this lost revenue now is actually a chance for increased profits soon: with more data coming in every day about single purchases vs. album purchases vs. streams, artists (and their labels) are slowly gaining the ability to optimize their efforts for the different revenues these streams offer!

  7. Aiden – one thing lacking in the Beatles early albums were their singles. It was a sticking point of George Martin to NOT include singles on albums as he thought it was duping the public. When Capitol decided to pad the albums out for US distribution they added singles but the original UK releases did not. This is what the “Hey Jude” (Beatles Again) album is – a collection of their singles.

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