Why are people still buying CDs? Now that digital sales are offered on iTunes, Amazon,… now that a new stream service appears every month, does it still make sense to buy physical CDs?
As everyone knows, digital formats are usually much cheaper (all these deals for $1-5 on Amazon!) and streaming services allow you to get all the music you want for free or a few dollars per month, nevertheless many people are still buying the physical object. At least the numbers for 2012 prove it: there were 193 million CDs sold versus 118 million digital downloads in the US. We don’t have the numbers for 2013 yet, but since the digital sales are up (+14.1%) and the CD sales down (-13%), it will probably take a few more years until the digital sales exceed CD sales.
Personally, I download most of the new music I get, and I have only bought CDs when there was a signing in a store so that I could meet the artist (it happened for Cat Power and Nick Cave), but I don’t think I would have bought their CDs otherwise, I would have just downloaded their albums, as the supposedly bad sound quality of MP3s has never been an issue for me. But since you can’t make your favorite artist sign a MP3, the physical form of the art (as well as the cover art) will remain an issue for some time.
Interestingly, according to Nielsen Soundscan, there are two parts of the country where people download more music than they buy CDs: Hawaii and San Francisco, may be the population is very young and hip over there? Because the tendency seems to go hand to hand with the age of the public: country lovers buy more CDs, and they are generally older than fans of other music genres.
But I realize I am getting old, as I am still getting MP3s, I still like to ‘own’ something, whereas the young generation should logically not be buying anything at all, neither CDs nor MP3s, but just use one of these streaming services.
So how does this translate for the most recent albums? Kanye West’s ‘Yeezus’ has been the talk of the blogosphere lately, people have declared it was genius, and bla bla bla… but ‘Yeezus’ only sold 328,000 copies the first week, a very disappointing start if you compare with Taylor Swift’s 2012 ‘Red’ which sold 1,208,000 copies, or even more recently, Justin Timberlake’s 2013 ‘The 20/20 Experience’ which sold 968,000 copies, … Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’ even topped West’s album sales with 339,000 copies sold during its first week.
So what’s going on there? Why are some artists still manage to sell that many albums when others don’t? Is it because West didn’t have Swift’s aggressive marketing campaign? Probably, he didn’t have his life-size effigy in Target, Walgreens and Wal-Mart stores around the country, and he didn’t partner with shoe and pizza stores, but still, I didn’t hear anything like this for Timberlake – beside the fact that it was a come back. Kanye West is a self-proclaimed rap-god, but in this case Timberlake was more god-like.
In the case of Kanye West, the absence of hit song, and the absence of packaging – people had the impression to buy a blank CD – have been identified to have played against him, but it is very difficult to predict and explain album sales in these changing times. I am still amazed artists are able sell so many copies in such a short amount of time when music is free on the internet. At the end, does it mean that Timberlake is more success than West? I am not sure.
I observe the young generation almost every day, and everything seems so disposable for them. They consume and get something else, and music is not treated differently. A CD almost lasts forever, but a MP3 is erased in a few second and Spotify allows you to switch immediately to a new track. CDs are dead, this current vinyl revival is ephemeral, and in a few years we won’t even be talking about album sales.