Future of Music Summit: 115,000 albums and only 110 'hits'

[Aaron]

Quote:WASHINGTON. D.C. – The Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit got rolling Sunday, an annual meeting of musicians, tech-heads, artist managers, academics and music-biz entrepreneurs. The summit’s forward-looking approach is all about making the best of the new reality created by Internet technology and how that might be affected by government policy decisions.

Sounds like heavy stuff. But wonkiness goes hand in hand with the myriad possibilities that await artists in a music industry very different from the one that existed a decade ago, before peer-to-peer file sharing came along.

We''ll have plenty more in upcoming days, but as a backdrop for the summit, here are a few tidbits of information shared by publicist Ariel Hyatt about U.S. album sales in 2008: More than 115,000 albums were released, but only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies, a mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales, and fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier -- further evidence that sales of recorded music are not the way of the future for artists. Instead, it increasingly appears that recordings will be more like adverstisements for opportunities that actually do make money: live performances, merchandise, licensing to movies, commercials and video games, ring tones, etc.