Britain has seen a resurgence in the sales of vinyl records. In the first six months of this year, the public bought 324,000 vinyl albums – almost as many as were sold during the whole of 2012, according to The Official Charts Company. A higher quality of vinyl manufacture is one reason for the revival but some record companies have been incentivising record sales with free digital copies and this is believed to have had an even greater impact.
‘As music fans embrace digital, there has been a shift towards vinyl albums with a digital download code included – while the higher quality of modern vinyl is also appealing to music collectors generally,’ says Martin Talbot, chief executive of The Official Charts Company. And there is further cause for optimism, says Talbot, with the launch of a new Amazon service. ‘Amazon’s AutoRip will further drive vinyl sales,’ he adds.
The online retailer has brought Amazon AutoRip to Britain after launching in the US in January. It offers free digital copies of vinyl records and CDs purchased, with the physical disc arriving in the post and an MP3 of each song appearing in a user’s Cloud Player digital music locker. The service is available for more than 350,000 albums, with more added continually, and is retrospective, so customers will receive digital copies for any AutoRip-enabled CDs and records bought since the retailer launched in 1999 (these will automatically appear in Cloud Player).
Available through any web browser, or in application form on Kindle Fire tablets, iPhone, iPad and Android devices, Cloud Player also offers the MP3s as downloads for use in iTunes, Windows Media Player or other music software of choice – free from digital rights management.
In addition to AutoRip digital copies, which do not count towards any storage limits, Cloud Player Free offers space for 250 imported songs at no cost. But should you want to store every song on your computer – up to 250,000 in total – you will have to pay £21.99 a year.
Other services are available that offer similar digital locker, cloud-based functionality, with iTunes Match costing the same for 25,000 songs stored in the cloud, and Google Play Music giving the option to store 20,000 of your songs in the cloud for free. However, as neither of the latter services sell physical media, neither has the capability to offer an AutoRip-style experience.
Amazon claims that its incentive has had a significant effect on the American physical media market in its first six months.
‘When we first launched AutoRip, on day one it was CD-only. We added vinyl 60 to 90 days later,’ says Steve Boom, vice-president of Amazon’s digital music business. ‘In between, when you looked at what people were requesting, vinyl was near the top of the list.
‘Vinyl music buyers are a passionate crowd and very vocal as well. And, of course, it’s much harder to rip a vinyl album than it is a CD; you can’t just stick it in your computer’s drive. So since we launched on vinyl we’ve seen a huge uptake in sales – it’s a rapidly growing segment of the market.’ The US CD market has benefited from the service too.
‘In the US, the overall CD market is on the decline,’ says Boom. ‘But since we launched AutoRip, the growth in our CD business has accelerated. We have seen a memorable, positive impact on sales.’
Naturally, the British music industry is keen to see a repeat of that trend on these shores. The British Phonographic Industry reports that, in 2012, just under 70 per cent of albums sold were in physical formats, with 30.4 per cent of all music album sales in the country being digital. And digital single sales amount to a staggering 97.2 per cent of the overall market, with that side of the physical media business already being effectively dead.
If Amazon AutoRip is as successful in Britain as Boom claims it has been in the US, the decline could be reversed or at least halted, according to the BPI.
‘We’re delighted that this service makes it even easier to enjoy the music you buy on CD on your computer and mobile devices,’ says Geoff Taylor, the body’s chief executive. ‘It combines the tangibility and collectability of CDs with the immediacy and convenience of digital music in the cloud: this is a great time to be a music fan.’
It may not be as good a time to be an independent record store, however. Amazon has been in the news for a lot of the wrong reasons of late and high-street indie music retailers might be joining bookshops in crying foul against a company that paid just £2.4million in corporation tax in Britain in the last fiscal year.
So while Amazon AutoRip could well be a saviour of vinyl records, it may not be as well received by those in the business of selling them.
Source : Metro
No comments:
Post a Comment