The other day a friend of mine pointed out how extraordinary it is that we are living in the year 2011, and I agree with him.

I, like most of you, was born in the 20th century, some years back in the 20th century, in fact, some decades back. Back in times when the year 2011 was something that really only existed in science fiction books and films.
2001 was the key sci-fi date, cemented in the mind by Stanley Kubrick's masterwork, but that's now long passed. In fact, most of the years that seemed so far away in science fiction have been and gone. Blade Runner is one of the few still to go – set in 2019 – but it seems unlikely that we'll have a fully-blown exodus to the off-world colonies in the next eight years.
Predictions about the future have been similarly inaccurate. Let's leave aside for a moment the imaginings of science fiction. Back in the 70s at the dawn of the computer age great changes were touted in society. I sat through lectures about what these new fangled devices would bring. The biggest one was the amount of leisure time we would all have. Because of computers doing our work we would only have to work minimum hours. The problem, apparently, would be how to deal with all that free time, the need to increase our leisure activities.
This, it turns out, was not entirely accurate.
The same thing happened in the music world as the rise of downloadable music spurred people into dire warnings about the death of music as we know it. There were many scenarios. Most common was that because of illegal downloading of music, sales would completely dry up, record companies would collapse and there would be no more CDs, albums or anything, just scattered independent tracks across the internet.
That hasn't really happened, though a number of other interesting phenomena have occurred. Large music companies are certainly not happy and have seen their (some would say excessive) profits decrease considerably. They have been slow and often misguided in their attempts to adapt to the new climate. Their fear is still illegal downloads, though fortunately the counterproductive overreaction of suing individual downloaders seems to have passed. It was never a good look for a multinational to sue some solo mother in Brooklyn.
But what are the real details of music sales?
Just released are the Nielsen SoundScan figures for music sales and they makes for interesting reading. The main figure, and it's not an especially happy one for music sellers, is that overall music sales dropped in 2010. However, it's unlikely that this was because of illegal downloads. Sales have risen consistently since the beginning of the decade. 2005 was the first year that sales had topped 1 billion and by 2009 this had risen to 1.6 billion. In 2010 this dropped back to 1.5 billion: could it just be the effect of the recession that is all around us? And within that figure there were some interesting positives.
Physical disks (in the US) still account for 90 per cent of sales – so downloads haven't completely taken over. (Ironically the third biggest genre by sales, after ‘Rock' and ‘R & B' is ‘Alternative' – so what exactly makes that ‘alternative'?)
Independent record shops consistently sell eight per cent of music. This figure has remained constant for years. Perhaps the rise of Warehouses et al haven't effected them so much after all…
And sales of vinyl albums were up by 14 per cent. (The Beatles' Abbey Road was the top vinyl seller for 2010). Admittedly there weren't a lot of LPs sold compared to CDs but it's impressive for a medium whose demise was so confidently predicted many years back.
What this means for musicians is another thing altogether.
Mick Jagger said this in interview last year:
'There was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't.”
We'll look into that, sometime in the future.