X&Y: 8% of New Album's Sales Are Paid Downloads

The path of p2p in the future has been uncovered just a little more with the news that 8% of EMI’s Coldplay's 'X&Y' sales were downloaded.

And that was mainly down to iTunes which had been accepting orders for the album for a month, says the LA Times. “The pre-orders - a first by Apple included two bonus tracks not on the physical CD,” it says.

But before you get too excited, of the 740,000 sold in the first week, only 64,000 went through iTunes which is, to all intents and purposes, the only viable online corporate music site. And even it is barely breaking even as a loss-leader for iPod.At EMI Music, “a total digital sales were more than $64 million in the fiscal year that ended March 31 - only 2.2% of its overall revenue, but more than four times the amount sold the previous year,” spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer is quoted as saying.

“Warner Music Group racked up more digital revenue in the first three months of this year - $35 million, or 4.6% of its total - than it collected in all of 2004, the company reported. Lawrence Kenswil, head of Universal Music Group's e-commerce unit, said almost 90 songs had sold more than 100,000 copies through online stores this year.”

Now all the corporate music industry has to do is stop ripping off its customers, such as Apple, by wholesaling ‘product’ at between 60 and 75 cents a pop. The corporate stores could then charge reasonable amounts for what are, after all, merely condensed low-fi versions of digital files which have already been created for CDs and DVDs.

They'd then be literally rolling in money.

Instead, Apple and RealNetworks, et al, are forced to levy around dollar per download, a price 99.99% of music fans flatly refuse to even look at, preferring to use the free p2p networks or pay sites such as those in Russia which charge only pennies for each track.

The Big Four record labels are spending millions on propaganda that says p2p file sharing is theft.

But nothing has been stolen and file sharing doesn't affect sales. It is, rather, the first really effective, and certainly the most powerful, ongoing form of citizen protest where hundreds of millions of ordinary people around the world have decided they're no longer cash-cow 'consumers' who'll swallow whatever is dished out by the industry.

Source: mp3newswire