is music different downunder?
(i think not)
the sydney morning herald leads me to some music industry numbers from the flipside of the planet.
the aria (that’s australian record industry association) has released their industry statistics for 2003. their headline: “Music DVD continues its rise whilst CD singles slide further.”
sure, there’s still room for indsutry spin, but the aussies managed 6% revenue growth in 2003, and managed to break sales records with total unit sales 1% higher than the previous record volume. all this despite the gobal internet and the vast number of pirates and thieves that the riaa hasn’t managed to prosecute yet.
how can this be? well, there’s a hint in the release – unit prices for cd’s are down, unit volume is up (this is a difficult concept, maybe you can ask an economist to explain it to you), dvd formats are up (this is an “adding value” approach), and there’s a mysterious “other” category which increased 6666.20% (units) or 5951.76% (dollars) over 2002. the footnote on the table says that this category “includes sales of Mini Disks & SACD” – but i’m guessing it also includes online sales. there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of play for a 6000-percent increase in a category.
peter martin has his own analysis, and while i disagree on some points (death of the album and it’s about the singles and suchlike…), it’s good to have perspectives.
strangely, this isn’t too far from some things we touched on here and there a couple months ago. so maybe it’s not so different.
then again, who is delta goodrem? 14-times platinum? and not a peep here.
update: slashdot has more.