MUMBAI: The French music industry has suffered a huge drop of 6.7 per cent in sales for its first quarter of 2013 (Q1 2013).
The country’s music industry body SNEP (Syndicat National de l’édition Phonographique) reported that physical sales saw a drop of 7.3 per cent drop in year-on-year to Euro77m ($100.2m). Digital Sales also experienced a 5.2 per cent slide to Euro 30.9m ($40.2m), contributing to an overall drop of 6.7 percent.
SNEP said decline in digital sales were cause primarily by– a pause in payments from YouTube that resumed in Q2, and a “special operation” in 2012 by a major label that was not repeated in 2013. Without the drop caused by these, digital sales would have been flat year-on-year.
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Album downloads grew marginally– 1.9 million albums were bought in Q1 2013 compared to 1.8 million in Q1 2012.
During the first quarter of 2013, the number of downloaded singles was down 21 per cent on the same period last year – 10.7 million tracks versus 13.7 million in 2012. Overall market share for digital content remained stable at 29 per cent, versus a worldwide average of 35 per cent, report said.
In its report, SNEP warned streaming subscription music revenues are ‘peinent ? décoller’ (struggling to take off) with a growth of just 2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. This, as a la carte digital sales fell 4.1 percent year-on-year too.
Piracy continues to be an issue with illegal P2P and non-P2P services attracting 10.7m visitors from France in January 2013, up from 10 million in January 2010 despite the Hadopi anti-piracy initiative.
SNEP also attributed the decline in digital revenues to a label deal that expired in 2012 and a YouTube agreement with rights group SACEM (Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique) that was suspended until the second quarter of 2013.
A SNEP chart also broke down the legal services used by 53 mn French people in January 2013: YouTube takes a 54 per cent share, followed by iTunes and Vevo (12 per cent each), Deezer (9 per cent), Dailymotion (5 per cent) and Spotify (2 per cent), with others accounting for a combined 6 per cent.
