I think the best remedy for poor album sales is releasing better albums. Just a thought.

the best remedy for poor album sales is to stop people from stealing music online, me being one of them.

down .7% cry me a river

I agree with Jeff.

There are more than enough good albums out there whatever style of music you're into. You should either go get your ears cleaned or stop listening to music altogether and spare us your negative comments every day. (Not necessarily directed to Jeff, but to many a-holes posting here every day.)

No, there certainly are a lot of great albums out there, but a lot of them aren't being released by major labels with huge budgets for marketing. For instance, there were some pop/R&B singles that a few labels decided not to make available on iTunes because they were afraid people would just download the single and forego the album. There are countless pop albums that are basically a few singles surrounded by filler. And that's my point. I'm not arguing that there isn't enough good music, but if I were running a label, I wouldn't want to put my marketing budget behind something that was mostly disposable.

While I can't remember the exact numbers, if you look at major label sales for most years, the drop in sales is smaller than the decrease in new releases. If you look at the charts, new releases make up most of it (with a few exceptions). If you expect 100% of the amount of sales in the new year while only offering 75% of the amount of diversity of product, well, um, you just aren't going to get to get it. Indies and microindies are just picking up the slack. I bet if we were to include CDs not counted by Soundscan, numbers would actually be up...but I base that off of absolutely nothing except for bands I know personally who just sort of make and sell their own CDs (it just seems more popular and POSSIBLE now than 10 years ago).

Everyone says the music industry can't keep up with digital downloads, in some ways, the music industry still lives in the age of sheet music.

"Everyone says the music industry can't keep up with digital downloads, in some ways, the music industry still lives in the age of sheet music."

Well said. The times they are a-changin', that's all.

The long-player is a dying format, and its even less than that. Technically, the full-length CD is just a packaged bundling of the real product - the songs. Back in the day, it was about the songs, the single. Then the industry decided to bundle many songs together in a long-player in the hopes of selling more. Of course, evolving technologies helped a little.

but blah blah bah NOKAYFB raises an interesting point - do they SCAN CDs at music festivals? i'd imagine not all of them, and from recent experience, indie bands, and crossovers, can make a killing at festivals. And taking into account that major increase in the number and size of music festivals - that's a big chunk that doesn't make it into stores, that really can't support the TRUE variety of music out there today...

and yeah 0.7% cry me a fucking river 'cuz the numbers aren't even accurate, and anyway they lie.

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