According to the MCPS-PRS Alliance (a UK-based composers and songwriters royalty collection agency), iTunes has boosted songwriters’ royalties by no less than 40 percent in the first half of this year alone. 40 percent! That’s, like, a ton (ok, they’re British, a metric ton, then) in the music world. Meanwhile, sales for CDs dropped 15 percent in the same period.
As The Daily Telegraph reports:The Alliance said the explosive growth in online royalties - although still a small proportion of overall royalties at £7m ($14 mil) - was “largely due to the continued growth in the licensed online music market led by iTunes”.
Despite the slide in CD sales. revenues from other ‘physical’ formats, including DVDs and pre-loaded USB sticks - were ahead of budget in the first half of the year.
Naturally, this news dovetails nicely on last week’s news that the NPD Group reports that iTunes is holding its retail music lead quite handily.
Maybe we'll finally see CDs drop in price. I mean $17.99 for a CD? Come on!
@krye:
I think this is very unlikely. As the kids who have to have the latest song, a la carte, whose ears have been so degraded by listening to nothing but 128,000 bps noise all their lives that they can't tell good sound from bad, buy all their music online, those of us who know what good sound is become more and more of a niche market, and the prices for us will never go down.
(If I sound somewhat bitter, it's because I was eagerly awaiting the outcome of the DVD-Audio/SACD format war to escape the grievous limitations of the CD format. So who wins? Heavily compressed downloads that are like icepicks in the ear!)
As a Brit, I'd just like to say that while our physical location placs us near Europe, we still quite happily use Imperial measurements as well as Metric - and we use the proper ones, not the 1/5th-off "pint" you guys use ;) It's only laziness that seems to have prevented British Imperial measurements from being included in OS X, with only "American" and Metric available as options for conversion :/
And I'd love to see the prices drop too - $18 for a CD? I wish! Prices over here seem to be converted merely by changing the currency symbols... Can it be any surprise that profits are strong over here when there's no increase in production costs yet we have to pay double?