Nielsen: Digital Music Sales Flat

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Portrait of a disaster: digital music sales in the United States went up 28 percent in the period between 2007 and 2008, up 13 percent in 2008 to 2009, but saw no growth from 2009 to 2010. The boom times for digital music have reached their plateau…at least in the United States.

This isn’t actually the disaster some might think (though chances are the RIAA’s already getting ready to blame the figures on pirates) as while the United States is holding steady on its digital music sales, growth is taking place elsewhere, like across Europe, with Great Britain, France and Germany all posting gains of at least seven percent over this time last year.

The managing director of Nielsen Music, Jean Littolff, had several possibilities for the weakened sales growth, and interestingly, not one of them involved piracy. Littolff pegged weakened sales on “weak consumer confidence, the appeal of new music releases and confusion over the many different ways people can buy music online”. And indeed, Littolff’s got a point. There are a lot of ways to buy music online, to the point where “saturation” would arguably become an applicable point here.

But either way, this doesn’t bode well for the music industry, though hopefully, it’s all just a temporary flux.