U.S. Album Sales Down 17% In 1st Quarter (Apr 7, 2007)

With the RIAA lawsuiting people who upload music (even the non-copyrighted material) and Soundexchange telling webcasters that they must pay more money to use copyrighted material, news comes in by allaccess.com that U.S. album sales fell 17% in the first quarter as rising online piracy and fewer new hits accelerated the music industry's decline, reports BLOOMBERG NEWS.

Retailers sold 117.1 million albums in the three months that ended APRIL 1. Although online purchases rose, they failed to make up for rising piracy and declining demand for compact discs. Album sales fell 4.9% last year after a 7.3% drop in 2005. Researcher NPD GROUP INC. said last month that illegal downloads of music surged 47% in 2006.

A grass-roots boycott of the major labels is apparently underway as consumers, fed-up with the strong-arm tactics of the RIAA, are downloading and buying music from independent musicians rather than to purchase CDs from the major four record labels. Piracy will do nothing but get more rampant and worse, as the RIAA is playing whack-a-mole, shutting down one pirate operation just as two more pirate operations start up.

Music fans are telling other people to shun the CDs from the major labels and to purchase music from the musicians that don't represent the major four record labels.

Another factor for the CD decline: the declining quality of music played on the radio. Where's the dance pop music? Where's the Dr. Demento-type music? Where's the modern adult rock music? Not on the dial in San Diego. Not in Los Angeles either. What does radio play? The same old worn-out songs people have long moved away from decades ago. They're not popular anymore, so you can't play the same song everyday like when they were once new.

Top 40 and CHR stations such as Channel 933, KIIS, and Star are also to blame for not playing what people what to hear: diverse and fun pop music. You can't get a music fan to buy dreck if that's all what the radio is playing.

Those radio stations are good for something: they let me know what songs suck so that I don't have to buy them to find out on my own. How many songs on their playlists suck? I don't know. All of them?

The RIAA needs to be abolished by the U.S. government. Tell your congressperson to craft up legislation to get this organization that's as equal as the Taliban outlawed forever.