Industry Pinning Hopes On 'NSYNC, Britney As CD Sales Decline
Fri., July 20, 2001 7:26 PM EDT
RIAA chief says upcoming releases should boost 2001's bottom line.
Despite big releases from Janet Jackson, Destiny's Child, Staind and the Dave Matthews Band, CD sales for the first half of 2001 are down 8 percent from last year.
Fans snapped up more than 234 million CDs in the first half of 2000, but this year sales dropped to 215 million, according to industry number-gatherer SoundScan.
The blockbuster trio of Britney Spears' Oops! ... I Did It Again, Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP and 'NSYNC's No Strings Attached helped drive up last year's numbers, and no release this year has matched those albums' sales.
Spears, 'NSYNC, Alanis Morissette, Jewel, DMX and other major artists are scheduled to release albums before the end of the year, however. Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said upcoming big releases should boost sluggish sales.
"I'm optimistic that our year-end figures will even out, as our numbers in the third and fourth quarters will reflect great products being distributed between now and then," Rosen told the Los Angeles Times.
When sales of singles declined last year the industry blamed Napster, but the file-sharing service looks to be an unlikely scapegoat for this year's problems. The number of songs available on Napster declined drastically between February, when a judge ordered it to screen out copyrighted music, and July, when the service shut itself down (see "Napster Cleared For Takeoff (Again) After Shutdown Order Overturned").
Fans continue to trade music files through various other file-sharing systems, which have increased in popularity in recent months.
In addition to the decline in album sales, concert ticket sales have also dropped this year (see "Concert Attendance Dips Sharply In First Half Of 2001").
