The British music industry got some great news yesterday when it was released that for the first time ever, in 2009 digital music royalties had surpassed the amount made from CD sales, which have consecutively been falling year on year.
Last year the royalties from online music downloads rose 72.7% up to a total of £30.4m with many consumers downloading from the popular Apple iTunes store. In 2009 around 16.1m albums were downloaded completely, which was a 56% increases compared to 2008.
PRS for Music, a group that is responsible for collection the royalties for approximately 65,000 British songwriters, stated that the growth in digital music revenue has actually begun to compensate for the loss in royalties due to the large decrease in CD sales. RPS for Music also announced that there was a general 2.6% increase in the annual revenue collected in 2009 totalling £623m.
Chief executive for the group, Robert Ashcroft, stated that 2009 was the first year that digital sales started to compensate for the fall in CD and DVD sales although the industry is still remaining cautious as to whether this will be a turning point that will last.
Ashcroft added that it does seem that there will be further growth over the next decade for the digital market and the increase of British music that is used overseas.
In 2009, music singles sold online totalled up to more than album sales within the UK, with a total of over 150m singles sold online while album sales fell down to 129m.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.