Recorded music sales figures for the first half of 2005, released yesterday, continue a worrying trend, with sales of CDs, records, cassettes and music DVDs falling 7.54 per cent on the previous year to 22.7 million units. The wholesale value tumbled 11.82 per cent to $209 million. It is the second year in a row that sales have fallen in the first six months of the year.
Here is the full report at the ARIA website (link to PDF at bottom of the page).
Total product is down, but:
More format confusion...
I'm surprised to see "DVD music video" sales down 9.68%. And music VHS sales appear to be negative?
The article also says of Australian iTunes:
According to Forbes.com, efforts by Apple to strike an iTunes licensing agreement for Australia with Sony BMG and Warner have so far come to nothing, and Apple has apparently decided to launch its online store without them.
And yet still, the majority of uses for the iPod (eg. ripping and playing your own CDs) are still illegal in Australia. Anyone fixing that? What's going on with copyright reform?
The article also uses the suggestion that Gaslight closing is an indication of a bad CD market. No. Gaslight always had expensive CDs. What they had was range and imports, both of which are killed off by online shops. Also, they fail to mention that this year has seen a massive increase in the number of JB-HiFi stores. I would suggest that having more discount CD stores around would kill off the "traditional" stores (like HMV) pretty quickly.
While looking around a second hand CD store for random tracks and only finding them on $20 compilations I decided I'd happily pay around $2 per track if I could download single tracks. Heck, maybe even $3. But only if they were uncompressed (or losslessly compressed, see FLAC). If they're lossy compressed I'm just not interested unless there is absolutely no other way of getting. If it's compressed you'd be lucky to get me to pay 50 cents.
I think I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The record companies have lost of the market on lossy compressed music. It's free, you can't compete against that.
But they OWN the market on losslessly compressed direct-from-master-tapes insane fidelity tracks. One of the biggest complaints of producers is that they have to "mix down" to 44.1hz CD WAV files. Record companies could sell premium mixes of their tracks in full DAT 48hz, uncompressed. All these new formats of CD are nice but the players are expensive.
EVERYONE who is going to buy your product online has a computer that will play high quality better-than-CD-quality music files.
They'd make an absolutely fortune.
Meanwhile, this year's "reasons why music sales are down in Australia this year other than piracy"
* I made these up but I'm probably right. I read today someone saying that they used to earn $45 a week and pay $4 to fill their car, while their son now earns $500 a week and pays $50 to fill his car. Still %10. But, based on house prices of my parents vs. me cost of a house (in Melbourne) is about 6 times the average salary vs. around 4 times in the 70s.
Update: A bit of a fish around found some articles (which I can't link to because they were hidden in a "please login" screen) which indicated all DVD sales are down in Germany, UK and Japan.
Round about now people start to get properly angry at the lack of public transport options in their suburb. Maybe they'll start voting for public transport instead of freeways.
Hopefully the Scorsby freeway arguements start to look a bit stupid now. By the time the thing is built no-one will be able to afford to drive on the thing. They'll be thinking, "maybe they should have built a train?"
Polly discusses the effect of petrol prices on public transport.
For many it can take two hours to get to work via public transport vs. 45 minutes drive.
At what point does it become cheaper (for a minimum wager for example) to work less hours (say, six instead of eight) and take public transport instead of driving? Anyone want to work that out?
Unfortunately I feel that the biggest hole in the Melbourne public transport system is the lack of buses. The problems of buses not synching with trains would go away if there were just more of them.
But buses run on petrol. I've always wondered why we can't get public transport tickets the same way some get cars as part of their salary package?