At best, in music sales it seems. It use to be that a band had a hit album if it went platinum — shipped 1,000,000 copies. As Billboard points out, that just doesn’t happen much any more. No artist album has sold 1,000,000 units (copies) in 2014 (but see note below).
And the pain for the music industry doesn’t end there:
Overall, digital track sales fell 12.9 percent to 848.5 million in the first nine months of the year ended Sept. 28, 2014, down from 974.6 million in the corresponding period last year, ended Sept. 29, 2013. At the end of 2013, the first year of the digital sales decline, track sales were down 5.7 percent and album sales were down 0.1 percent.
But in the first nine months of this year, digital album sales declined 11.5 percent to 77.6 million from the 87.8 million scans garnered in the first nine months of 2013. Meanwhile, CD sales were down 18.9 percent to 91.7 million from 113.1 million units, which means that overall album sales were down 14.4 percent.
Ouch.
The only good news? Vinyl sales are up 47.5 percent (!) to 6.074 million units while indie stores are holding their own, seeing only a 2.3 percent reduction in sales.
(Note: The RIAA uses a weird definition to certify albums as going platinum, relying on units shipped instead of units sold. Obviously, it’s easier to reach a million units shipped than a million copies actually sold. Either way, the numbers are extremely bleak and a big hit in 2014 isn’t near as big as a hit was in years past.)
