(i think not)<\/p>\n
the sydney morning herald leads<\/a> me to some music industry numbers from the flipside of the planet.<\/p>\n the aria (that’s australian record industry association) has released<\/a> their industry statistics for 2003. their headline: “Music DVD continues its rise whilst CD singles slide further.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> to explain it to you), dvd formats are up (this is an “adding value<\/a>” 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.<\/p>\n peter martin<\/a> has his own analysis<\/a>, and while i disagree on some points (death of the album<\/a> and it’s about the singles and suchlike…), it’s good to have perspectives.<\/p>\n strangely, this isn’t too far from some things we touched on here<\/a> and there<\/a> a couple months ago. so maybe it’s not so different.<\/p>\n then again, who is delta goodrem? 14-times platinum? and not a peep here.<\/p>\n