The music industry continues in its sales funk as physical U.S. album sales, not surprisingly, have fallen by 17 percent so far in 2007.
The culprits are said to be the growth of online music purchases and not very many big-name albums released yet.
Albums sold for the year in the U.S. are at 135.8 million, while last year at the same time they were at 163.3 million, said Nielsen SoundScan.
So far this year, the biggest names to release albums have been Norah Jones and Tim McGraw. Jones' album, "Not Too Late," has sold around 1.2 million copies, while McGraw's "Let It Go," comes in at about 570,000.
Chris Muratore, vice president of retail relations for Nielsen Entertainment, said, "If you look at the last couple of years, fewer and fewer of those acts have been released in the first half of the year and this year has been horrible. It's proven that if you put something out, an established name, a big name, people are going to go buy the music."
This isn't exactly rocket science in figuring out what is happening. People in the past have been forced to buy albums or nothing at all. Now that we have the options of buying singles online, it leaves a lot less incentive to buy a whole package of songs via a CD to listen to a couple of favorites.
I agree that those that produce some quality albums that have a lot of songs will continue to sell, it's in the hands of the entertainers to produce that type of product. The days are generally over when people will purchase an entire album because they like one or two songs on it. Why would they?
Norah Jones Singing "Thinking About You"
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