Buying Music Turns Out To Be The Only Thing Americans Are Thrifty And Sensible About

Good news, y’all: music isn’t a “niche” interest after all. In fact, contra the usual griping from the industry, the number crunchers at eMarketer say that there are actually more music fans hitting up record stores and online vendors than there were almost three decades ago. But (and here’s the big but):

Yet the average price per purchase is being reduced by the large numbers of consumers buying single MP3 downloads.

The 30% drop in compact disc sales from 2000 to 2005 was too steep to be offset by digital sales. The 16% drop in CD sales from 2005 to 2006 was partially offset by digital download sales growth.

The net effect is still a falling average price per music purchase, decreasing overall music revenues.

eMarketer interpolated the Bridge data with US Census Bureau population estimates dating back to 1980. While the total number of US music consumers has more than doubled to 96 million in 2006 from 45 million in 1980, annual per capita music expenditures have dropped drastically to $120 in 2006, from $198 in 1980.

In other words, the return of the 99-cent musical snack value meal (among other factors) has allowed lots of people to invest very little in music and come away satisfied, rather than gorging themselves on multiple CDs per trip to the store. The fix? Well, Hypebot suggests traditional retail upselling, but as someone who worked in a record store for several years, I can tell you that it’s hard to get clerks to operate a barcode scanner let alone put on their salesmen’s cap and convince someone that if they like Justin Timberlake their life would be immeasurably improved by this Al Green record. Also, it’s kind of hard to upsell when the consumer is engaging with a static browser window or iTunes software beyond Amazon-style “Customers Who Bought [X] Also Enjoyed…” And as Hypebot points out re: the dreaded ringle, the music industry’s ideas about “value for money” have not typically been tethered to any kind of traditional notions of, you know, reality.

Myth Of The Active Music Buyer [eMarketer via Hypebot]