Twitty Tuesday: Music Sales Cut in Half

Good morning Jenny Marie PR Blog Readers!

So the word on the street is that the music industry isn't doing too well lately, but apparently it started taking a toll back in 1999. I came across an interesting article posted on CNNMoney.com today titled, "Music's Lost Decade: Sales Cut in Half". I was shocked to find out that the past decade has revealed a plunge in music sales from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research. So why have music sales gone down so much? Many argue that it's the growing popularity of digital music - They may be right. Napster made its debut in 1999, the same year that music sales started plummeting tremendously. Not only did CD sales drop when Napster came out, but cost of CD's dropped as well. Even Tower Records, my favorite store back in the day, went out of business.

The music industry is struggling to monetize all the changes that technology has accumulated over the past decade. With websites like Pandora.com, Lala.com and many more (see pic), people don't even really need to purchase music anymore because they can just listen to it online for free. A Belarussian friend of mine uses http://www.vkontakte.ru. The site is known by many as "The Russian Facebook". I recently created an account there just because of the mere fact that you can create a really cool, personalized playlist and you can also listen to your friends' playlists as well.

So where is the music industry heading now? Forrester forecasts that sales will continue to decline until it reaches $5.5 billion by 2014.

Click here to read the article that I read this morning and learn about the music industry's future and the licensing fees of Myspace and Pandora: http://bit.ly/cFG3xF