Posted 08/04/2009 - 12:49pm by Julia M
.jpg "Music: More Popular Than Ever")
The last few years may have been disastrous for the record companies, but that hasn’t prevented an exponential increase in the number of new album releases each year. According to Nielsen’s Soundscan numbers, there were 105,000 new releases in 2008 in the US. That’s 4 times as many as were released at the beginning of the decade. Of those, just 6,000 sold 1,000 or more copies. That’s just 5.7% of all new releases.
The story is similar around the world. According to a panelist at the recent Musexpo Europe conference in London, the number of new releases in the UK has also increased dramatically in the last few years, up more than 30% since the year 2000. And like everywhere else, the number of releases that qualify as hits continues to drop.
Besides the big increase in the number of new releases each year, another indicator of the soaring popularity of music and the exploding growth of non-traditional ways to expose it is the phenomenal increase in music activity on MySpace. Here’s a look at how the number of band sites hosted on the site has exploded in recent years:
- 2005 – 600,000 bands
- 2006 – 3,000,000 band
- 2009 – 10,000,000 bands
To read the full "Tech Trends" from the week of 8/03/09, click here.
