Are Music Industry Stats Relevant to You?

If you haven’t had a chance to download and browse Nielson’s 2009 presentation at NARM, you should check it out now. If you’ve been keeping your finger held to the pulse of the music business at all, none of this will surprise you. But it’s still good to keep yourself informed with the latest information available so that you can decide how to interpret it and how it might influence (or not) your decisions.

Some general trends:

• Listening to music (what they call making “music decisions”) is more ubiquitous because of 24/7 on-demand access.
• Digital music is estimated to be about 40% of total music purchases, compared to 8% in 2005.
• Physical sales at mass & electronic retailers (Best Buy, etc.) are down, sending a slight increase to value-oriented retailers such as superstores and evil companies like Wal-Mart.
• Vinyl sales momentum continues…
• Statistics tend to vary widely from genre to genre. Of course, this is a demographic matter. It shouldn’t be too hard to understand that classical and country will have slower digital growth than pop or indie rock.

It should go without saying, but keep in mind that industry stats give a macro view of what is happening, which, while informative on some level, may have absolutely nothing to do with what’s happening in your career.  Of course, don’t live by these numbers (you’ll die by them too) - weigh them in conjunction with everything else, including your own observations about what is happening in your own specific genre, scene, or locale.

In my opinion, we are in a time where pop culture tends to skew statistics to the point of being irrelevant. For example, the huge increase in vinyl sales in the last couple years has more to do with aesthetic appeal (nostalgia) than it does anything else. Consider that in the top 10 selling vinyls for the year are Elliott Smith, Guns N Roses, Bob Dylan, and Neutral Milk Hotel. There’s something going on there, and it probably doesn’t have anything to do with you. In other words, please don’t press your new release in vinyl unless you have a really good reason to do so. All of this is simply to say you may be a better arbiter of what’s going on in the music business than anyone else can be right now. Stay informed, and then pay attention to what’s actually happening around you.