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As the decline of traditional music sales continues at a steady pace, all eyes are on format shift
ANALYSIS
While the decline in music sales is still inescapable, the slide of the singles and albums markets didn't gain any extra momentum in Q3 2014 compared to the previous quarter. Compilation albums, however, did suffer an uncharacteristic performance dip over the last three months.
Singles sales of 36,541,613 in the third quarter of the year represented a 16.7% decline on 43,861,027 sales over the same period in 2013. Meanwhile, compilation album sales slipped 5.4% year-on-year from 4,909,897 in Q3 2013 to 4,642,605 in Q3 2014. For comparison: compilation albums saw a 6.8% year-on-year growth in Q2 14.
The decline in album sales slowed in the last three months compared to Q2 2014, although only very slightly. A 5.7% year-on-year drop from 18,809,714 in Q3 2013 to 17,743,340 in Q3 2014 mirrors the decline at the same point last year - and it's a slight improvement on the 6% year-on-year decline seen in Q2 this year.
Within the Q3 14 total album sales figure, there were 12,478,734 artist albums sold (-6.4% YoY), 10,496,187 CD album sales (-5.5% YoY) and 6,965,553 digital albums sales (-7.3% YoY). Vinyl albums are the only positive in the last quarter's set of results, rising 46.4% year-on-year from 181,084 to 265,190.
What the Official Charts Company sales data doesn't demonstrate, however, is the impact of streaming, which is more prevalent in 2014 than ever before. At the end of Q3, for example, US singer Meghan Trainor was able to break into the Official UK Singles Chart Top 40 on streams alone - the first artist to do so since the format was incorporated into the rankings in July. Trainor's All About That Bass reached No.33 offthe back of 1.17 million plays across streaming services, prior to its full release.
The BPI has provided data to give 'Track Equivalent Albums' (TEA) by dividing track sales by 10 and 'Steaming Equivalent Albums' (SEA) by dividing streams by 1,000 which, when combined, suggest a 0.6% increase in overall album 'sales' driven by streaming growth (see Track and Streaming Equivalent Album
To give an idea of that growth in isolation; there have been 10.2 billion audio...