Big Champagne provides data about the music business. Eric Garland, founder, made the last presentation.
People are buying more but spending less. Price per unit is declining. YouTube is now the number one place that people listen to music? Wow!
Only 2% of albums sold 5K copies or more in the UK. The number of new platinum albums has declined over the past four years from 35 to just 12. Also, most digital sales are songs, not albums. [makes sense to me].
Holy Cow! My Space and YouTube are REALLY big compared with digital sales; and they are dwarfed by P2P.
Another problem is that pirates are very efficient at providing music on P2P before it is released. And the search engines help everyone find the sites quickly.
Great evidence that "popular is popular", i.e. the best selling albums are also the ones most downloaded. We cannot use this fact as evidence that file-sharing has no impact on sales.
