Music revenues rise in digital download

LONDON - Reuters

US singer Lana Del Ray is at the fifith place in 2012 revenues with 3.4 million album sale. AFP photo

The music business broke a 12-year losing streak in 2012, posting a small but symbolic 0.3 percent rise in trade revenues to $16.5 billion, figures from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) showed yesterday.

The slight increase will come as a relief to record label bosses who have watched the value of sales plummet from a peak of $28.6 billion in 1999, as illegal downloads and a reluctance to embrace the digital age hit revenues hard. Once again it was the digital sector that showed the strongest growth, and for the first time more than compensated for losses in physical revenues.

Record companies’ digital sales rose about nine percent last year over 2011 to $5.6 billion and accounted for 34 percent of income overall.

 Download sales increased 12 percent to 4.3 billion units globally. Digital album sales rose 17 percent to 207 million.

According to the IFPI, the most successful album of 2012 was British singer Adele’s “21” which sold 8.3 million copies from 18.1 million in 2011. U.S. artist Taylor Swift came second last year with “Red” (5.2 million), British boyband One Direction took third and fourth positions with “Up All Night” and “Take Me Home” respectively (4.5 million and 4.4 million), and U.S. singer Lana Del Rey came fifth with “Born to Die” (3.4 million).