eMusic Data Shows That Bigger Sales Are Albums

New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ eMusic)- eMusic, a leading digital music retailer, announced today that over the past year full album downloads accounted for 72% of its worldwide sales. Single tracks accounted for 28% of total sales. Following the introduction of album pricing in July 2009, which enables eMusic customers to purchase selected albums for lower prices, album sales have risen to 75% of total sales, on average.

eMusic customers have consistently purchased more complete albums than individual tracks for the last several years, with full albums accounting for an average of about 69% of total sales worldwide since 2006.

This trend runs counter to data reported by other major sites, such as iTunes, and by Nielsen SoundScan. Although digital album sales continue to increase in the market as a whole, they lag significantly behind individual track sales. According to Nielsen SoundScan, in 2008 U.S. consumers bought more than a billion digital tracks, but only 65 million digital albums. Total album sales (including physical product) declined by 14% in 2008.

"While Apple and their major label suppliers continue to figure out how to make albums more appealing to music buyers, eMusic customers already purchase more albums than single tracks," said Danny Stein, eMusic President and CEO. "Although the majority of our customers are over the age of 25, we encourage them to buy more music with subscription and album pricing and more musical context than any other service."

eMusic encourages complete album purchases with editorial features that place albums in context, including career surveys of leading artist's catalogues ("Icons"), examining an artist's peers and influencers ("Six Degrees"), and overviews of genres, labels and favorites ("eMusic Dozens"). Additionally, eMusic's album and artist pages include related artist information from YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia. eMusic subscriptions offer MP3 downloads at prices ranging from 40 to 50 cents. Album pricing offers even better deals on selected albums.