U.S. mobile music revenues to decline to $740M in 2013

With 2009 marking the tenth consecutive year of declining [1]CD sales, eMarketer forecasts U.S. sales of recorded music will drop from $8.4 billion in 2008 to $5.52 billion in 2013--while online sales will experience healthy growth and physical formats will continue to plummet, mobile music sales will trend slightly downward, falling from $820 million last year to $740 million in 2013. According to eMarketer, spending on CDs and other physical sound carriers dwindled to $5.8 billion in 2008, down 60 percent from a peak of $14.6 billion in 1999--physical sales will generate just $960 million in revenues by 2013. "Unfortunately, the sum of online and mobile will not compensate for losses in physical, but it will slow down the rate of those losses to a 2.9 percent drop in 2013," says eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna.

eMarketer anticipates mobile music spending will decline 5.6 percent in 2009, and drop an additional 3.5 percent in 2010--online sales will grow 22.0 percent this year, and 19.0 percent next year. After a recent NPD Group survey noted that the percentage of U.S. teens who downloaded or listened to music via social networks increased from 26 percent in 2007 to 46 percent in 2008, eMarketer adds that many music fans are gravitating to social sites via iPhone applications, citing the example of digital radio service Pandora--as of May 2009, the Pandora iPhone app boasted about 4 million users, with the app accounting for about 20 percent of the 1 million songs downloaded through affiliate links each month.

For more on mobile music's future:
- read this eMarketer article [2]
- and see these charts [1]

Related articles:
Study: Mobile music [3] experience satisfies most users
UMG: Mobile now close to half of digital music sales [4]