Rock is King
Posted on | April 24, 2004 at 1:47 pm | Comments Off
There was an interesting article in the Rocky Mountain News this morning from pop music columnist Mark Brown, dissecting the RIAA’s annual consumer profile. One tidbit: Rock is the #1 selling genre, though it’s still declining while Hip-Hop/R&B is still growing. Although Brown makes a good point that with many artists crossing into different genres, it should be difficult to break things down that way.
What I found most fascinating was this paragraph:
Fact: Digital downloads accounted for just 1.3 percent of all music sales last year, falling far behind even cassette tapes at 2.2 percent. The growth areas aren’t poor-sounding MP3s so much as high-end new formats such as Super Audio CDs and DVD-Audios. Combined, those made up 3.2 percent of all sales. Granted, that’s not overwhelming – yet – but when you consider the whole world knows about MP3s and few people have heard of SACDs and DVD-As, it’s a telling look at what’s to come.
Of course, the RIAA is only logging legally paid-for digital downloads, and I’m sure there’s a lot more downloading going on that people are not paying for. But I’m heartened by the fact that the hirez formats seem to be doing okay, especially in relation to legal downloads. Now if only the record companies would actually support DVD-A/SACD. They all seem to be ramping down production of them, probably because the perception is that they’re not selling well enough. Well, maybe this report will turn things around. I can hope.
Latre.