New statistics out of the USA put a reality check back into the music industry. For starters, for a solo artist in the USA to earn the minimum wage ($1,160 per month) they need to sell 12,399 tracks on iTunes. For a group, you can divide that figure by the number of members in the band.
iTunes Logo
The Daily Swarm has published the list of music industry stats for 2011.
We learn that there has been a 77% decline in debut album sales since 2003 and with that a 17% decline in employed musicians.
Only 17% of the global online community download music legally.
With the shutting of record stores in the USA, now 27.4% of all albums sold are digital.
Only 16.5% of Internet users in the USA purchase digital music. People are three times more likely to stream music than download it.
Solo artists need to sell 1,299 albums on iTunes or 1,161 CDs at retail per month to make a minimum wage.
They would need to have 4,053,110 plays on Spotify, 1,546,667 plays on Last.fm or 849,817 plays on Rhapsody to earn that minimum wage.
The online music services are:
EMUSIC – 27 countries
iTunes – 23 countries
YouTube – 21 countries
Vodafone – 17 countries
7Digitial – 16 countries
Spotify – 12 countries
Last.fm – 10 countries
Amazon – 6 countries
Deezer – 4 countries
Pandora – 1 country
Rhapsody – 1 country
