Nielsen SoundScan reports that digital track sales in Q1 this year in the US slipped by 12.5% (to 312m units) from the same period 2013. To exacerbate matters, digital album sales also dropped 14.2% (27.8m units) in the same period. Collectively, total digital sales fell by 13.3% in the quarter. Billboard suggests that on-demand streaming (so excluding services such as Pandora and iTunes Radio) “appears to be making up the slack, on a revenue basis at least”. On-demand streams stood at 25.44bn in Q1 2013 but in Q1 this year they had grown to 34.28bn. Not only that, but the (average) per-stream rate has increased from $0.00375 to $0.005 meaning that, according to Billboard’s tabulations, a total of 1,500 streams now “equals the wholesale costs of an album”. Talking of albums, the CD market in the US continued to tank, dropping 20.5% to 31.9m units. Electronica was the only major genre to record growth (up 2.7%) and 16 tracks passed the 1m mark, led by ‘Happy’ by Pharrell (with 3.6m sales), compared to 15 tracks that sold over 1m each in Q1 2013.
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In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…