AfterDawn: News

UK music business sees record album sales

The UK Music Industry is celebrating its biggest ever year for album sales, reporting 237 million sold in the 12 months to September. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) trade body said albums by the likes of Keane and The Streets had helped drive a 3% rise compared with last year. Also, sales of music singles were up aswell, due to the new available of digital tracks in online music download stores. Next year, the BPI plans to add music downloads to the album and singles charts. 1.75 million tracks were sold altogether from legal music download services such as MyCokeMusic and Wippit. This puts sales of singles tracks up 9% on the previous quarter.

However, if you take away the figures for download sales, then singles sales would be down by a huge 12% so online music seems to be flexing its muscle a little more. However, sales of traditional 7" singles were up for the 11th quarter in a row, with sales topping one million in the year to September - an increase of 74.8%. If you take these record sales into account, and the happy smiles of the BPI, you can’t help but question the comments made by the BPI only a few weeks ago when they launched their first lawsuits against British P2P users they claimed were doing serious damage to music sales.



Source:
BBC News

Written by: James Delahunty @ 26 Nov 2004 15:03

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• 3 comments

• daemonzx6

  the music industry contradicts itself soooo often. god, i hate those guys. almost as much as i hate legal online music stores with their DRM.

  27.11.2004 15:33 #1

• wick780

  The music industry is just a big joke. Their goal is to make money. They would slaughter a million children to make a buck. I have never seen a company cry and act so stupid about nothing...they are making money, their sales are up...yet they cry and want to sue people to get that extra buck. If they could get away with charging a human soul per album they would.

  29.11.2004 07:52 #2

• vudoo

  Services like Napster will always rule over all the paid services because you can pay $9.95/Mo and Download all you want. Yea Yea its DRM but if you know a little about computers and Electronics you can record it to your Mp3 player no problem. The people Complaining about DRM are the people who want to share their music with 60 million other people accross the globe. DRM is a fact and you either deal with it or cry like babies. Most new Mp3 players support Napster files. Now I will complain a little about the 128 bit rate. They need to get real and at least use 192 for the files you Download. 128 is not that good for a WMA file. And the labels aren't playing fair by not offering the entire album at times. But there is alot of Alternative Rock and Classic Rock/Metal from groups like Judas Priest on Napster. So now I can relax and remember those great songs of the upper 70's and the mid 80's and still be able to chat with friends in Yahoo cuz I know when I download these Napster songs they'll work every time.

  29.11.2004 21:28 #3