Taylor Swift was named the most popular recording artist based on sales across all formats. Photo / AP
Taylor Swift was named the most popular recording artist based on sales across all formats. Photo / AP
The decline in worldwide recorded-music revenues slowed last year as more people subscribed to online services. The proportion of sales from digital destinations equaled those from physical formats for the first time.
Global revenue for the industry, whose best-selling album was the movie soundtrack to the film Frozen, fell 0.4per cent to $14.97 billion last year, with declining downloads and physical sales, according to a group representing music labels.
At the same time, music-streaming sites helped boost digital sales by 6.9 per cent and Japan, the world's second-largest music market, registered digital growth for the first time in five years, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said on Tuesday in a statement.
The growth in digital sales was welcomed by an industry that's spent at least the past decade trying to counter drops in demand for CDs and the closing of record shops worldwide.
Revenue from online music services rose 39 per cent to $1.57 billion from the prior year, from subscribers and advertisers buying space on the sites. Some 41 million people pay subscriptions for music from services such as Spotify and Pandora, up from 28 million in 2013.
The rise of YouTube as a major online destination for music listening was also highlighted in the report. An estimated 57 per cent of Internet users listened to music or music videos on sites such as YouTube in the past six months, versus 38 per cent for a streaming site and 26 per cent for download services like iTunes, the group reported, citing researcher Ipsos.
The movie soundtrack to the film Frozen was the recording industry's best-selling album.
Though downloads still account for 52 per cent of digital sales, the figure declined by 8 per cent last year and single-track downloads fell by 10.9 per cent. Physical sales dropped 8.1 per cent, though they remain the format of choice in a number of countries, including Germany with a 70 per cent market share, Japan with 78 per cent and South Africa with 62 per cent.
In the US, digital revenue totaled $3.5 billion last year and accounted for 71 per cent of the recorded music market.
Based on sales across all formats, Taylor Swift was named the most popular recording artist, followed by One Direction and Ed Sheeran. "Happy" by Pharrell Williams was the best-selling single last year, followed by "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry and "All of Me" by John Legend.
