The decline in worldwide recorded-music revenues slowed last year as more people subscribed to online services. The proportion of sales from digital destinations equaled those from physical formats for the first time.
Global revenue for the industry, whose best-selling album was the movie soundtrack to the film "Frozen," fell 0.4 percent to $14.97 billion last year, with declining downloads and physical sales, according to a group representing music labels. At the same time, music-streaming sites helped boost digital sales by 6.9 percent and Japan, the world's second-largest music market, registered digital growth for the first time in five years, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said Tuesday in a statement.
The growth in digital sales was welcomed by an industry that has spent at least the past decade trying to counter drops in demand for CDs and the closing of record shops worldwide. Revenue from online music services rose 39 percent to $1.57 billion from the prior year, from subscribers and advertisers buying space on the sites. Some 41 million people pay subscriptions for music from services such as Spotify and Pandora, up from 28 million in 2013.