Album sales are expanding as artist exposure increases through electronic sales

Jul 7 2011
By Jonathan Spike

In the first six months of this year the sales of albums, (yes, those albums like CDs) have increased one percent as compared to the same time period last year.  This is being attributed to a 19% increase in digital albums purchased.

Nielsen SoundScan came to this conclusion.  Who would have thought that the digital sales would have led to this?

Many industry observers noted that the digital age would spell disaster for album sales.  For a while, that seemed to be the case.  But lately, other things seem to be changing that and I noticed what could possibly be the root reason for this new trend.

I went to a popular place to find some new tunes.  I searched for some jazz and some gospel music and found a couple interesting tunes and selected them.  At less than a dollar each, why not?

I then get recommendations that “other people also bought…”introduced me to several tunes that I also tried.  I purchased a couple of singles and found a new Wynton Marsalis album I hadn’t heard and a great singer, Avery Stafford, who caught my attention.

These recommendations would not have been made if I walked into my favorite big store and went to the CD section.  So this shows how the sales of digital recordings have increased sales dramatically as recommendations are displayed for the consumer.

How does this lead to CD sales, rather than electronic sales?  I’ll tell you and I’m surprised I have not read this elsewhere.

If I downloaded each of these two artist’s albums, I would have been limited to playing them on my iPod, smartphone, laptop and various computers.  I know, that doesn’t seem limited, but I could not play the digital albums on my CD player/boom box.

So, I bought both these albums then loaded them into iTunes (I also set the iTunes preferences to import as MP3 files) then copied the digital tunes to my other devices and up to my cloud account.  Now I have the best of all worlds and helped make the artists, CD sellers and myself happy by being able to play my tunes everywhere and anywhere I wish.

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