Music royalties fall for the first time ever

The Performing Right Society report a drop of 1 per cent in total royalties.

By Liam McLaughlin Published 28 March 2011

PRS have reported a 1 per cent year-on-year drop in royalties - the first time this has ever happened - from around £618m to £612m in 2010

Reasons for this include the closure of high street music outlets, lagging physical music sales, and the difficulty of regulating the use of music online.

Digital and physical sales dropped by 7 per cent in 2010 and the CD market itself fell by 12.4 per cent. This has led retailers such as HMV to close down many stores in an attempt to cut costs.

The diminishing amount of music retailers will continue to fuel the decline in music consumption as a whole.

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2 comments

Mon, 2011-03-28 19:29 — frances smith (not verified)

i love this. it reminds me of politics. all this denial.

do these people ever consider the possiblity that music sales may be dropping because the quality of the music on offer has shown a corresponding fall?

though i might occasionally download if i want a single track, it is far more economical to buy a cheap cd off amazon, even with the postage, than to download. and the quality of cd recorded music is higher than that of an mp3 file, and i can add it to my computer music library. so why don't people buy cds then?

so if the poor quality mp3 is seen as a better way of buying music than a cd it must say more about the disposable nature and quality of the music of music on offer than the music industry wants to hear.

Tue, 2011-03-29 00:14 — Orwin O'Dowd (not verified)

More unnerving is the dogma that mp3 has no defect of "psychoacoustic" substance, and the fact that developers may not question this dogma under threat of censure and exclusion. Behind the groupie networks lies this quiet tyranny of trolls, resting on techrepublican doctrines of manifest destiny and psychohistory. All now in recession...