Each year on April 22, Record Store Day gives us a chance to momentarily celebrate the once-mighty king of music by heading to our nearest boutique record stores. Among musicians and record labels it’s a time of yearning for the good old days when record sales were real and the money flowed.
In the age of streaming, however, that money well has basically dried up to the extent that revenue from physical musical purchases is negligible.
Streaming is the newest king of music sales. Twenty-sixteen marked the first year that streaming sales from sites like Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play overtook CD and download sales to become the primary money maker for record labels. It’s a stat that doesn’t appease record companies or the artists they employ. Streaming has begrudgingly been accepted as the inevitable result of the music industry’s loss in a long battle to retain any type of reliable revenue.
Vinyl has been touted by some as a saviour of the record industry, being the last point of physical sales, a place where real money can be exchanged for a real physical product. Some stats support this assertion.
According to Nielsen Soundscape, vinyl album sales have increased every year for the past 11 years. Thirteen million records were sold in 2016, an increase of 10 percent from the year before. That doesn’t include used sales. Compare this with a 16.3 percent decrease in CD sales and a 20 percent decrease in digital sales and it’s true that vinyl is on the rise.
But it’s not enough to sustain the industry, not by a long shot. The connoisseurs buying physical albums are not going to turn the industry around. It’s too late.
Streaming is the new mode of consuming music and it’s here to stay. It costs next to nothing—around $10 to have the entire world’s music library on your cellphone. Everything is there. With auto-generated playlists, data driven by your personal taste, music has reached peak delivery.
