TOKYO: Strong growth in streaming revenues couldn’t stop the recorded music business’s official worldwide income dropping under US $15bn for the first time in 2014. New statistics from the IFPI show that overall global record industry revenues dipped by just 0.4% last year – but that was enough to pull the annual tally down from $15.03bn to $14.97bn.
The biggest culprits for the fall were an 8.1% decline in revenues from physical format sales (to around $6.89bn, according to MBW calculations) and an 8.0% decline in download sales (to around $3.56bn).
Single track downloads declined by 10.9% in the year, while digital albums sales saw revenues drop by 4.2%.‘Mobile personalisation’ sales – essentially ringtones – fell by 17.9% to around $206m.
The IFPI’s numbers – presented in its new Digital Music Report – take record sales into account in addition to streaming income (ad-supported and premium). They also count sync revenues and performance rights money collected from broadcasters and public venues for the use of recorded music.
Another first for the industry in 2014 was that digital and physical music consumption contributed the same proportion of total revenues for the first time (46% apiece), pulling in around $6.85bn each.At least, they did so long as you accept an important new stipulation.
The IFPI has decided to start reporting SoundExchange collections in the US – ie. artist and label payouts from digital and satellite radio services such as Pandora and Sirius XM – as ‘digital’ income rather than performance royalties. (As a result, performance rights collections in the US have been set to nil in the IFPI’s numbers.)
Considering SoundExchange paid out $773.4m to rights-holders in 2014, this obviously provides a significant boost to ‘digital’.In fact, SoundExchange collections alone make up around 11.3% of 2014’s total ‘digital’ figure and 5.2% of the overall global industry income from all revenue streams.
