Comments on: Music Sales 2008

By: skyhirecords

skyhirecords — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:58:21 +0000

Rap was down 30% in 2007 and everyone had a field day. How much is it down 2008 ????. Classical music dropped 26% but not a comment?????

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/01/cd-sales-plummet-15-digital-sales-gain-45/

By: fiveboroughs

fiveboroughs — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:14:24 +0000

Hey Barry, since the new design lost the running sidebar of music, how about top 10 albums of 2008?

By: gloppie

gloppie — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:41:53 +0000

I only buy Vinyls at thrift stores, Goodwill, Salvation Army and the like. $1 is my price limit for an album.
There is great music to be enjoyed for cheap.
Mp3 is bad for your ears, it will deplete your enjoyment of Music overtime. Mp3 uses masking algorithms to remove what the human hearing “can’t hear”. If it was played, it can be heard, trust me. By removing it, this encoding desensitizes your ear/brain. After a while, yes you can’t hear it, anymore. Shame on them.
Digital Audio (non-lossy) is ok, with enough bits (>24bits) and high enough sampling rate (>96 Khz)
Needless to say, most current production is not to my liking.

By: jason

jason — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:59:32 +0000

Madonna – $105 million
Celine Dion – $94 million
Eagles – $73.4 million
Kenny Chesney – $72.2 million
Bon Jovi – $70.4 million
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – $69.3 million
Neil Diamond – $59.8 million
Rascal Flatts – $55.8 million
The Police – $48 million
Tina Turner – $47.7 million

From this data it looks like only Geezers can afford to go out to shows…what do the kids do these days? Is it that MP3′s have finally killed the mega acts and fragmented the scene?

By: Dr. Kenneth Noisewater

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:51:14 +0000

I guess somewhere along the line I became a curmudgeonly old fogey.. When bands start sounding like other, earlier bands… Granted, it might be nice to take in live music, but even then “it’s too loud!”.

Can I really be that old? Or is there that much more chaff out there that it makes wheat so much harder to find? (Or is it that “back in my day”, MTV actually _played_ music videos, and radio stations had a playlist longer than 30 songs? WLIR/WDRE FTW…)

Frankly, the newest music I have comes from the ‘music of YTMND’ collections… (otherwise I’d never have heard of Dragonforce, Electric Six, Coburn, etc…)

By: Barry Ritholtz

Barry Ritholtz — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:30:53 +0000

Used CDs have been a fascinating data point for many years — I’ve been working on massaging some data together on this for quite some time

By: Jojo99

Jojo99 — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:12:52 +0000

I brought a bunch of CD’s – but they were mostly all used. I rarely buy new. I think a lot of people buy used CD’s also but the industry doesn’t appear to have any way to track used CD sales.

The used stores I frequent also seem to have a lot of used vinyl which again, I doubt are tracked.

I never buy digital. MP3′s sound too crappy and besides I can make my own digital copies if desired at my own chosen bit rate.

By: JohnnyVee

JohnnyVee — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:47:30 +0000

A roomate in collage(-I like the spelling better than college) dragged me to a Bruce Springsteen concert–I wasn’t a fan at the time. It was the best live concert I have ever seen. And, I saw KISS back in the day.

By: asiankida

asiankida — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:35:59 +0000

I don’t buy vinyl, but that’s mostly because I have limited space and am not that big of an audiophile. I personally still buy CD’s because I can’t justify shelling out cash for something so fleeting and intangible as an mp3. If it’s an album I feel that I can listen to over and over again, then I will make the purchase because I consider it as an investment.

By: Che Stadium

Che Stadium — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:24:27 +0000

Its good to see that I’m not the only one buying vinyl. As far as the old acts go, I hope there will be a US tour by Blue Cheer in 2009.