Canadian Music Industry Report Confirms Digital Trends

Sales of digital music reached new highs in Canada in 2008, but apparently not enough to offset the loss in physical album sales.

The purchase of digital music tracks increased some 58 per cent last year, but physical media-based music sales dropped 14 per cent.

Nielsen SoundScan Canada, the entertainment industry's data information system that tracks point-of-purchase sales of recorded music product and Nielsen BDS, the music industry’s leading music performance monitoring service, have announced their 2008 Canadian year-end sales and airplay monitoring data, for the 52-week period December 31, 2007 through December 28, 2008.

Overall, digital music track sales increased some 60 per cent last year over the previous year, and end of reporting cycle figures showed the greatest increase near the end of the year.

In the final reporting week of 2008, digital track sales surpassed 1.8 million, breaking the previous record of 1.2 million.

The sales achivement was reached, interestingly enough, before the recent announcements of significant changes at one of the laregst online music stores, Apple's iTunes.

It will remove digital rights management (DRM) locks on its music sales, enabling customers to more freely and easily share, move and listen to digital music. New price points were also announced. 

2008 Year End Factoids:

Overall Album sales (including Albums and Track Equivalent Album sales) declined 8.5% compared to 2007, which shows that the digital growth did not offset the decline in physical sales during the year.

Total album sales declined 14% compared to 2007.

42% of all albums purchased were at a Mass Merchant/Non Traditional outlets compared to 37% in 2007 and 34% in 2006.

Retail (Chain/Indy) music stores accounted for 58% of all album sales, compared to 63% in 2007 and 66% in 2006.

Digital Factoids:

More than 40 million digital tracks were purchased in 2008; an increase of nearly 60% over 2007 compared to a 73% increase in 2007 over 2006.

The top 200 tracks accounted for 19% of all track purchases in 2008; 7.7 million sales compared to 4.7 million sales in 2007.

Digital album sales increased nearly 70% compared to 2007 with sales of 3.4 million compared to 2 million in 2007 and represented 10% of total album sales in 2008. In 2007 digital album sales increased 93% compared to 2006.

In the final reporting week of 2008 the following digital sales records were broken:

Digital track sales surpassed 1.8 million. The previous sales record was 1.2 million, week of 12/23 -12/30/07.

Digital album sales this week broke the 100,000 mark for the first time with album sales of 142,000; breaking the previous record of 99,500 digital album sales (11/30/08).

Lady Gaga’s Just Dance is the first digital song to break the 20,000 sales mark for one week; with sales of 27,000. The previous record was Madonna’s 4 Minutes which sold 18,285 earlier this year (3/30/08).

The top 100 digital songs for the week posted an all-time high with 457,000 sales; breaking the previous record of 262,000 during the last week of 2007.