Recording Industry on Growth path,Manages a Sliver of Growth for the First Time Since 1999

For the First Time Since Napster, Music Sales Are Growing

The last time music was a growth business was 1999 — back when people bought millions of Britney Spears CDs,and GeoCities was the third-most popular Web property in the world. You know what’s happened since then.

But music’s slide may have finally stopped. Last year, recorded-music sales inched up 0.3 percent worldwide, to $16.5 billion, according to industry trade group IFPI. That’s the first time global sales have increased since the Napster era, and it echoes bumps we’ve seen earlier in the U.S. and other markets.

According to the report from the IFPI, growth is being driven by digital revenue, which was up 9-percent in 2012. That digital sales accounts for $5.6 billion in revenue, which is just over one-third of the total. A full 70-percent of the digital total comes from online download stores like iTunes, which means that despite their millions of users, subscription-based services like Spotify and Pandora aren't generating nearly as much industry-sustaining revenue as some of them would have you think.

If the growth sustains, it means that the predictions we’ve been hearing for a decade and a half have finally come true: Digital sales are increasing fast enough to outpace the decline in physical. Last year, digital grew 9 percent and accounted for 34 percent of revenue.

Some of that growth comes from the rise of subscription services like Spotify and Deezer, which now represent more than 10 percent of worldwide digital revenue. But digital sales are still primarily about iTunes and download sales, which account for 70 percent of the total. Sales on iTunes have been flattening for some time in the U.S., but as Apple expands internationally, its numbers keep growing.

And just like last year, the music industry is also a synonym for the Adele industry. Just like last year, her “21? album was the world’s best-seller, moving 8.3 million units (this would have been a pretty good number in 1999, too). Taylor Swift’s “Red” came in second with 5.2 million units. Brit boy band of the moment One Direction had the next two spots, with total sales close to nine million.

Either way, growth is growth. Congrats to the music industry on its .3-percent bump.

source:allthingsd.com/

Why people love listening to new music. Revealed!

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A new study has identified the specific brain activity that makes new music rewarding and predicts the decision to purchase music.
The study was conducted at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro, McGill University.

Participants in the study listened to 60 previously unheard music excerpts while undergoing functional resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning, providing bids of how much they were willing to spend for each item in an auction paradigm.

“When people listen to a piece of music they have never heard before, activity in one brain region can reliably and consistently predict whether they will like or buy it, this is the nucleus accumbens which is involved in forming expectations that may be rewarding,” said lead investigator Dr. Valorie Salimpoor, who conducted the research in Dr. Robert Zatorre’s lab at The Neuro and is now at Baycrest Health Sciences’ Rotman Research Institute.

“What makes music so emotionally powerful is the creation of expectations. Activity in the nucleus accumbens is an indicator that expectations were met or surpassed, and in our study we found that the more activity we see in this brain area while people are listening to music, the more money they are willing to spend,” Salimpoor stated.
The second important finding is that the nucleus accumbens doesn’t work alone, but interacts with the auditory cortex, an area of the brain that stores information about the sounds and music we have been exposed to.

In other words, the brain assigns value to music through the interaction of ancient dopaminergic reward circuitry, involved in reinforcing behaviours that are absolutely necessary for our survival such as eating and sex, with some of the most evolved regions of the brain, involved in advanced cognitive processes that are unique to humans.

The study was published in the journal Science.

Credit: http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/1821751/report-revealed-why-people-love-listening-to-new-music