The UK Recorded Music Market in a Long-Term Perspective, 1975-2016

The UK recorded music industry body BPI (British Phonographic Industry) reported a remarkable increase of recorded music sales from 2015 to 2016. According to BPI the growth was mainly driven by music streaming revenue, which increased by 61.0 per cent in a year-to-year comparison. Thus, as BPI (2017) points out, “(…) streaming accounted for 30 per cent of overall label revenues in 2016 (compared to physical at 32 per cent).  Such a rate of growth will undoubtedly see the format overtake physical to become the leading contributor to label revenues in 2017.”

The sales trend, however, indicates that the UK is on the way to a music streaming economy – as the US market, a fact I have highlighted in an earlier blog post. In the following long-term analysis of the UK recorded music market I am highlighting not just the recent recovery of UK’s recorded music sales in the past few years, but also the seemingly irresistible boom of the recorded music market since the mid-1970s and the tremendous sales decline in the 2000s.

Advertisement

The Recorded Music Market in Germany, 2003-2013

The German Federal Association of Music Industry (Bundesverband Musikindustrie – BVMI) reported a slight growth of recorded music sales by 1.2 percent for 2013. The main reason for the first increase of music sales in the past 15 years were growing digital music sales by 11.7 percent from 2012 to 2013. At the same time, the physical music sales moderately declined by 1.5 percent to EUR 1.12bn. Whereas CD sales fell by 1.3 percent to EUR 1.0bn, the sales of vinyl records grew heavily by 47.2 percent to EUR 29.0m in 2013. Since the CD has still a market share of 69.8 percent, one should be cautious to speak about a turnaround of the German recorded music market. A stabilization of the physical music sales is unrealistic and the increase of digital music sales has to over-compensate the loss in the physical market segment. Although the revenue from ad-supported and subscription music services increased by 91.2 percent to EUR 68.0m, the single-track download sales fell for the first time by 4.4 percent to EUR 104.0m in 2013, which makes a turnaround scenario highly questionable.

In the following, the future development of the German recorded music market will be analysed based on the BVMI report as well as on historic empirical data.

The recorded music market in the US, 2000-2013

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently published the sales figures (shipment figures) for the recorded music market in the US for 2013. Accordingly, digital sales increased by 7.6 percent to US$ 4.36bn from 2012 to 2013. Nevertheless, overall sales (digital and physical) slightly decreased by 0.3 percent from US$ 7.016bn to US$ 6.996bn in 2013. Thus, the sales decline of 12.3 percent (US$ -325m) in the physical product (CD, vinyl, DVD, SACD) could not be compensated by the growth of the digital music market. All in all, digital music sales accounted for 64 percent of the overall recorded music sales in 2013.

The strong increase of digital music sales is fueled by the booming music streaming and subscription segment, which grew 39 percent in 2013, generating US$1.4bn in revenue. However, single track download sales shrank by 3.3 percent (US$ -54.6m) in the same period. Digital album sales have slightly increased by 2.4 percent or US$ 28.7m from 2012 to 2013. These figures seem to indicate a cannibalizing effect of music streaming on download sales, even if we consider recent price cuts by digital music distributors.

The following analysis does not only highlight the digitization process of the recorded music market in the US in past thirteen years, but also the tremendous change of the digital music market segment.