Message 28/69
Date: 05-Apr-04 @ 08:21 AM -
RE: um... excuse me... RIAA? HELLO!?!?!
Strangely enough, cd sales in the UK and Australia are going up!
'by the BPI's own admission - a point not made in its recent 'file sharing destroys industry' statements - UK album sales rose 5.6 per cent last year. That runs contrary to last week's BPI claim that "despite falling retail prices, album sales have remained relatively stable over the last three years". '
Indeed, total album shipments yielded a 2.1 per cent increase in revenue to £1.112bn. In other words, the "falling retail prices" have led to rising unit sales and revenue growth and not the reverse, as the tone of the BPI quotation above suggests.
The BPI's numbers were this week paralleled by an equivalent set of numbers put out by the Australian Record Industry Association (Aria). It too notes falling CD single sales, but failed to point out that Australia's CD sales reached record numbers last year. 2003 marked the first time more than 50 million albums were sold, and sales of all music formats reached beyond 65 million, also a record. Sales have been rising since Napster et al launched.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/36616.html