Worldwide sales of recorded music fell 3 percent last year as consumers bought fewer compact discs and sales of illegal CDs and unauthorized downloads outweighed a shift to online purchases.
Retail sales totaled US$33 billion last year, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said yesterday in a statement. Record companies made US$21 billion in trade revenue last year, the group said. Sales rose 1.6 percent in 2004.
Companies such as Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and EMI Group Plc are relying on digital sales to counter declining CD revenue. The record companies' digital sales almost tripled to US$1.1 billion last year. The group blamed the decline in physical sales on piracy, competition from other media and the shift to online buying.
"The theft of music in its various forms continues to exact a heavy price," Mitch Bainwol, chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, said in a statement. "The piracy problem on college campuses is evolving and presenting new challenges."
In the US, retail music sales were little changed at US$12.3 billion, or US$7 billion wholesale. The US market accounts for more than a third of the world's total.
Legal digital music sales increased as consumers downloaded songs onto portable devices such as Apple Computer Inc's iPod as well as onto their mobile phones.
IFPI said global CD album sales dropped 6.7 percent last year.
"The global music market is fast becoming a mixed economy in the way fans and consumers are buying their music," IFPI chairman John Kennedy said in a statement.
The world's best selling album last year was British rock band Coldplay's X&Y, which sold 8.3 million copies, IFPI said. It was released by Capitol Records, a label owned by EMI Group PLC.
No. 2 The Emancipation of Mimi, which sold 7.7 million albums for Island Def Jam, a unit of Universal Music Group. Carey's album was also the best seller in the US.
At No. 3 was rapper 50 Cent's The Massacre. It sold 7.5 million units for Interscope, another label at Universal, the world's largest record company.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained