Album sales still down

An interesting article at the Beeb proclaiming Downloads up as album sales drop (featuring a picture of Susan Boyle presumably signalling the end of the album or something) notes that for the fifth year in a row, album sales - including whole album downloads - are down, but single song sales, particularly from downloads, are way up. If you think about this date, it is pretty clear that downloads are killing the music industry. But it is the legal ones. The fact that it is now easy to buy the one or two songs you like from an album have made the rest of the album pretty disposable. For years, I've been saying "Want to increase album sales, Big Music? Then stop releasing shitty albums".

I wonder if the sale of independent artists CDs are down as much? These are artists who generally look at an album as a whole work and are selling to a market that respects the album as a whole work. I wonder what the case is there? Ever since the music industry, particularly in America, killed the single to stimulate album sales, people have been bitching about having to buy entire, shitty albums to get one or two good songs. And now they don't have to. So really, the fall in album sales is in fact a normalising of album sales, and after inflating sales through the nineties with catalogue reissues and shitty albums, Big Music is going to have to deal with the fact that they aren't nearly as likely to shift multi-multi-platinum "artists" and should maybe instead look at building sustainable careers out of gold selling artists. Like they used to.