Piaras Kelly PR – Public Relations in Ireland

There’s been plenty of talk about digital music sales and the flattening of iTunes transactions of late. Nicholas Carr offers some good commentary as usual.

As an iPod user and iTunes user I see a lot of truth in what is being said. Despite owning an iPod for around three years now, I have only purchased thirty-six songs – that’s effectively one song per month.

However, there’s lots of things that these reports are overlooking. In my youth I was one of those teenagers that was “big into their music.” I owned around 300 CDs at one point, so when I purchased my iPod my efforts were focused on transferring these songs onto the device.

One thing that I realised about iTunes straight away was that I would probably never buy an album again. I had spent a number of years forking out my hard earned cash for an album consisting of 15-20 songs, only 3-5 of which I had any interest in listening to regularly. I spent the next couple of months purging my music collection of all the “excess fat”.

Music sales are flattening for a reason, people are tired of being forced to overpay for music. Instead of paying approximately €22 for a new album on Grafton Street, people download the music they want and leave the rest sitting on the store shelf.

The best way I can sum this up is the fact that in the 3 years I have owned an iPod I have downloaded one album. It was Neosupervital‘s self titled album and that was last week, a full 36 months later!

Like many others, I am eagerly looking forward to Amazon’s rumoured music service. I’d prefer my music to be DRM free. However, I don’t think this is going to lead to long term surge in digital music sales. In my opinion we’re seeing consumer demand readjust, reflecting the fact that we are no longer being forced to overpay for music.

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