You read the headline correctly: "Music sales plunge amid rising sales." Only the music industry, clinging desperately to Mr. Edison's gramaphone technology, could make a 14% growth spurt sound like doom and gloom.
The lead on a widely circulated story about music sales in 2007 is full of hand-wringing about the precipitous 9% decline for the "fast fading" music business.
The article disingenously mixes up declining sales on albums, illegal music sharing, and sales of single tracks, and news writers and editors should be ashamed for reprinting this stuff without actually reading it, because it is completely nonsensical.
If you read the entire article critically, what is very clear is that consumers are buying many more single songs and somewhat fewer albums. But overall, music sales are still increasing year to year--14% in 2007. Most businesses would kill to have a 14% per year annual growth rate. But the music industry stubbornly continues to blame their customers for simply buying only the good songs and ignoring the bad ones, which the real dynamic.
In the old days, the physical format needed to distribute music (vinyl records, CDs) made it efficient to sell a bunch of songs at one time. But most of us know that you often bought an entire album of nine or ten songs just to get the one or two good ones. Today, we don't have to buy the dreck just to get the good song. That's good for music lovers, and in fact, that option of buying only good music is producing double digit growth in the music business.
But the music industry is "fading fast."