Good News for the Music Business in 2016

Flickr photo by NedraI

I'm not a sales guy. Truthfully, I want to measure the success of a project based on whether it is artistically compelling. However, I'm a pragmatist and understand that the challenge facing the music business now is how to build a sustainable future. That future is based on sales. You simply can't be a successful artist without making money (and that will be a subject for another post).

There was some good news in a study published this week by Pricewaterhouse Coopers and reported on by Billboard.biz (hat tip to @musicregistry).

In it, they predict a 5.5% increase in the US music market by 2016, buoyed by a rise in digital sales and despite the continued decline of physical sales.

The most exciting part of the study, as Pricewaterhouse Coopers' Greg Boyer is quoted, has to do with the contribution of subscription services:

[They are] providing unique opportunities for artists, for the labels, and unique opportunities for other companies that are growing up in that new environment."

For me, the opportunities that are emerging are the future of the music business. And believe me, I'll take it.

Physical v. Digital Sales

An important record business sales metric is the rate at which digital sales are overtaking physical. (Unfortunately, one not as fast as we'd like.) While not illustrative of the music market as a whole, it does provide some insight on consumer habits.

Here's a link to an interesting analysis by Mark Mulligan at paidContent of UK and US digital versus physical sales. In it, he offers up his explanation of the "Post Holiday Surge" as well as some background on the rate of change of the proportion of digital to physical sales.