Congratulations to Eminem on his best selling album Recovery! While yes, he must be positively thrilled, blowing runners-up such as Lady Antebellum, Taylor Swift, and Justin Bieber out of the water, this is not necessarily good news for the music industry as a whole.
Album sales for 2010 fell by a considerable 12% since 2009. Dropping from 2009's 373.9 million albums sold to 326.2 million albums sold for 2010, it's difficult to say what the future holds.
The question remains: what is causing this drastic drop in sales? The answer can only be one thing: pirating music.
The lines of what is legal and what is illegal in the world of downloading music consists of very blurred lines. I know in my own experience, people say that using sites like LimeWire is not illegal when in reality it is. Other sites such as mp3 converters allow viewers to insert the url of a YouTube video and download the sound from that video, giving easy access to pretty much any song available.
Another question that needs to be considered is if pirating music actually affects the career of an artist. Significant income is not lost from illegal downloading because artists make most of their money from touring. At this point, it really doesn't seem like there is any way of stopping illegal downloads.
Americans definitely don't purchase music the way they used to. Upon reading the article about Eminem, one user commented, "Nobody wants to buy a full album to get one good song with nine crappy ones."
This statement rings completely true. I, myself, have never purchased a full album from iTunes. Why should I? Of the few albums I want, I want the concrete version. Everything else I purchase as a single.
While yes, Eminem and Taylor Swift can occasionally swoop in and save the day, raising sales with their amazingly popular albums. But the question remains, will creating a best- selling album every few years really be enough to save the music industry in the long run?
If Eminem didn't put Justin Bieber to shame in the music sales catagory, I would be utterly distraught. But go "Em", way to top the charts just like old times! Unfortunately, due to the music pirating "industry", his album sales are quite a bit lower than what they actually are, as I have more than a few friends who ripped the entire disc off of Limewire.
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