There has been a lot of things said about the music industry(some true, some not so much), but the most prominent message I have heard is the music industry is dying a slow and painful death. Unfortunately only one metric has been used to come to the conclusion, and that is CD sales. Using that one metric is very deceiving when there are multiple delivery systems for music. So let's look at a few things that disputes the music industry's death. According to NDP;

Album sales for 2011 were up 1.3%, the first sales uptick since 2005. 66% of those sales were CD's.

There were 250 million albums sold in 2011. I am not talking about individual songs of an album, but whole albums. This is for the US ONLY.

75% of album sales were done at brick and motar sites.

40% of CD sales went to folks 40 y/o and over. These are the folks that grew up on CD's. Surprisingly 60% of CD sales went to 40 y/o and younger, a demographic that is usually associated with single song purchases on Itunes.

Vinyl sales increased 37 percent in 2011, but only accounted for 1.2 percent of all physical sales.

Digital country music sales are up 31% over 2010. Country music fans were slow to get into digital sales, and country music labels have been pretty slow at getting into the digital sales.

While the music industry is far from dying, it is certainly changing and diversifying. Rather than looking at one metric or delivery system, you really must combine all the revenue streams together. When you combine music streaming, digital and physical sales, licensing, and re-transmission, the music industry is not only healthy, but doing quite well.

On the other side of the coin, music production really has changed quite a bit over the last decade. Large music industry studios that used to handle the bulk of production in the 80's and 90's are now giving way to home studios and smaller boutique recording and mastering facilities(like mine) which are now doing the bulk of the work. While my own studio is mainly a movie and television post production facility, mixing and mastering for audio only formats have jumped about 40% in the last year or so. Studio equipment has gotten better, more sophisticated, better sounding, cheaper, and easier to work with than in the past.

One thing that is certain, the reports of the death of the music industry are not only inaccurate, incomplete, but exaggerated as well.