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Yes, record sales are down, which is leading the Record Industry Association of America to make asinine claims. Seriously, we can’t rip CDs to MP3s? The only end that would serve is to put record stores out of business. But I digress. This is about mobile music, and how by the year 2012, mobile music sales are forecasted to top the $1 billion mark. It reminds me of the episode of South Park where the kids see that Britney Spears has been forced to downgrade to a Gulfstream 2 because of illegal downloads.

This is said to only cover 20 percent of all digital music sales, though we can see forecasts increasing in the future, since the CD is going to the way of vinyl. With so many ways to use MP3 players — in the car, with a docking station at home, and its original portable state — CD sales are going to wither out as we’re moving all our files digitally to our iPods.

James Quintana Pearce of mocoNews puts the situation perfectly:

it’s actually the record labels which are in trouble, and the analysts predict that artists will increasingly keep the lion’s share of music revenues by selling directly to the consumer.

It worked incredibly well for Radiohead (and I love the album, for what it’s worth), and others are jumping on the bandwagon, like Nine Inch Nails. And when you see more “free agent” records, as Trent Reznor puts it, you’ll see them as digital releases, not physical ones.

The study predicts that there will be 266 million music-capabale handsets by 2012, though they’re grim in forecasting that just nine percent of owners will use their handset as a portable devices. So I guess they’re not on board with Apple’s idea for an all-in-one device.

[mocoNews,net]

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