James Delahunty
26 Nov 2004 15:03
The UK Music Industry is celebrating its biggest ever year for album sales, reporting 237 million sold in the 12 months to September. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) trade body said albums by the likes of Keane and The Streets had helped drive a 3% rise compared with last year. Also, sales of music singles were up aswell, due to the new available of digital tracks in online music download stores. Next year, the BPI plans to add music downloads to the album and singles charts. 1.75 million tracks were sold altogether from legal music download services such as MyCokeMusic and Wippit. This puts sales of singles tracks up 9% on the previous quarter.
However, if you take away the figures for download sales, then singles sales would be down by a huge 12% so online music seems to be flexing its muscle a little more. However, sales of traditional 7" singles were up for the 11th quarter in a row, with sales topping one million in the year to September - an increase of 74.8%. If you take these record sales into account, and the happy smiles of the BPI, you can’t help but question the comments made by the BPI only a few weeks ago when they launched their first lawsuits against British P2P users they claimed were doing serious damage to music sales.
Source:
BBC News