Yesterday a bit of a mess unfolded around reports of the US digital market slowdown. The chain of events as we understand it is this – new Nielsen statistics revealed that 1H10 single track downloads in the US had reached a plateau. The UK’s Financial Times broke the news of the report on Sunday. But the article did not distinguish between single track downloads and album sales, saying that ‘according to figures from Nielsen…630m tracks were downloaded in the first half of 2010 in the US, flat on the same period last year’. Reuters broke news of the statistics on Monday, claiming also that the market had reached a plateau. But yesterday Billboard criticised Reuters for ignoring album sales in its initial analysis, and pointed out that if they were taken into account the market would have grown 5.4%. Yesterday Nielsen Entertainment president Eric Weinberg gave us his comments on the matter: ‘The initial Nielsen analysis was focussed exclusively on digital single sales and did not look at the strong growth in digital albums, which we expect to continue. Or, the impact variable pricing for singles has had on increasing industry revenue.’ He also pointed out that ‘Nielsen data continues to show strong growth in digital music consumption’ and ‘in addition to digital sales, there has been a proliferation of streaming services, both music and music video, which consumers continue to embrace.’See yesterday’s Music Ally report for a look at what all this really means for the digital music industry.If your not yet a subscriber, then why not try out our service on a 2 week free trial.
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Tools: Kaiber
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