Newsflash: No One Buys Music on the Web–Except for the People Who Spent Billions Last Year
by Peter Kafka
Posted on January 16, 2009 at 3:46 AM PT
Web folk have a fairly justified suspicion of anything they hear from official music industry reps these days. But this stat seems about right to me: 95 percent of all songs downloaded on the Web last year were stolen, says the industry’s international trade group.
The IFPI estimates that some 40 billion tracks were stolen/shared last year, though it’s not entirely clear how the group came up with the math. Regardless of the methodology, that’s bad, right?
Depends on how you look at it. The IFPI also notes that people spent some $3.7 billion on digital music in 2008, which is up about 25 percent. Figure about half of that comes from Apple (AAPL), which moves about two billion tracks a year from its iTunes store. The remainder would be from mobile, with a very small smattering from services like RealNetworks’ (RNWK) Rhapsody and a few dollars spent on ad-supported services like News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace Music, etc. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and of this Web site.)
But the standard summation still applies: The growth of digital has yet to replace the decline in physical sales–overall music sales dropped seven percent last year.
