Australia music sales up
p2pnet.net news:- With the corporate music industry at large spinning tales of woe, the ARIA (Australian Record Industry Association) has issued its report for music sales in 2006, highlighting both growth in overall volume of sales (up by 7 million or 27%) as well as an increase in sales by Australian artists.
The press release provides a detailed summary and in particular notes an increase in digital sales and an increase in CD sales compared with the previous year resulting in a wholesale market drop of only 3%.
Unlike many of the International markets, CD album sales increased nearly 8% in volume to 50 million units, but were ultimately sold for less money resulting in an overall decline in value of over 5%
Offsetting this drop was the increase in digital sales:
“Wholesale digital music sales increased dramatically during the period, up by more than 250% to $27.8 million.”
However, realistically this only equates to an overall increase of 4% to 21 million units and as reported in September in relation to the first half of the sales in 2006, the vast majority of digital sales were of singles not full albums (at that stage only 0.7% of digital sales were for full albums).
In September, it was also reported that sales by Australian artists had increased in the first half of 2006 to 31.8% of the Top 100 albums (27 artists) compared to 23% in 2005 – this increased further in the second half of 2006 to 37.7% (32 Australian albums with 7 in the Top ten). Australian artists also featured in the top 100 singles chart accounting for 27.2% of titles compared with 22% in 2005.
So overall, while the market declined in value, the number of legitimate purchases increased.
Furthermore it can be characterised as a good year for Australian musicians with a greater proportion of the sales going to local artists.
Of course, there have been no individual file sharing lawsuits in Australia during the period in question, which appears to support the argument that the sharing of files can have a positive influence on local markets.
ARIA claim to represent members that account for 95% of Australian sales, leaving open the suggestion that non ARIA members may have also experienced an increase in music sales in the last year.
p2pnet.net, Listening to the Music (3 May 2006)
Sally Hawkins – p2pnet, Australia
[Hawkins is a former musician and songwriter who decided to study law after doing a course in Music Business Management in 1991; she's worked for various departments in both federal and state Australian governments, holds a Bachelors Degree in Legal and Justice Studies (Criminal Law), a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and is currently a postgraduate student with Southern Cross University writing a thesis on Copyright Law/P2P File Sharing.]
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