This NYT op-ed contains an interesting infographic, meant to illustrate the dramatic shift in music sales since the advent of the web. Nested is an unexpected (for me) tidbit of perspective on the weight of music videos, or rather, of music video sales, in the general equation. A mere speck in the past, today mv's look like a pretty equal contender. Weighings-in?

I wonder what they categorize as music video units shipped? Is it DVD collections? iTunes downloads? Concert movies?

Based on what that charts says is the year that seems to be peak sales for MV (04/05?) I would say it must be counting iTunes sales PLUS the more traditional tape/disc stuff. Maybe iTunes sales, which started strong-ish but then quickly faded are the reason that was THE peak year, but it looks like the main driving force in sales of MVs is always more of a DVD/VHS kind of things for hardcore fans purchasing every last frame of Trent Reznor playing keyboards in a studio.

Sales of videos themselves has never been the goal of the music video industry and it likely never will be. It used to be the goal was selling the records/CDs, and has now morphed into a genereal raising of awareness of the artist (yeah that sounds weak to me as well, which is why the budgets are what they are these days).

Music videos were at their most 'important,' at least sales tool-wise, at the turn of the millennium, and if you look at that chart, you'll see 1999 was the top CD sales year. Mission accomplished.

I'm just going to assume that music video sales means anything that you can purchase on the music DVD aisle at a Best Buy + (starting in 05) iTunes sales. Just from anecdotal experience of working at a Best Buy back in the day I can tell you that only about 15-20% of those DVDs are actual music video compilations as opposed to concerts/documentaries. So my guess is that nearly 50-80% of what's being counted as "music video sales" is really not mv-related at all. To this day I still don't know a single person who pays 1.99 for a video on iTunes although I suppose so long as some people are paying why not post them.

$16 Billion to $2 Billion in 10 years, it's even more painful in infographic form. The real kicker is this nugget: "of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs." Jesus.