As you may have seen on Hypebot or NME.com this week, the BPI’s final summary of 2009 music industry figures have been released and it’s ‘a mixed bag.’ The gory details:

• Total UK recorded music trade income rises 1.4% overall to £928.8m
• Trade revenues from physical formats down 6.1% to £739.9m
• Digital income now a fifth of total recorded music revenues – up 47.8% to £188.9m

The main observation: digital sales have offset the losses accrued in physical sales, leaving not a very large margin of growth at all. Forrester Research usually provide their insight into BPI stats and figures, and once again they’re on hand for an expert opinion:

What does this mix report mean for the future? According to Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan, the glass half empty perspective is appropriate. “The UK recorded music market has lost close to 40% of its value since 2003. Though this isn’t necessarily a dead cat bounce, it is going to take a lot more than 1.4% annual growth to turn things around”.

Take all if this with a pinch of salt – especially when you consider alternative viewpoints, such as those expounded upon by The Guardian in late 2009 (around the same time, InformationIsBeautiful highlighted how the New York Times took the MUCH longer view).

Even more interestingly, at the end of last year Synthtopia published a graph comparing recorded music revenue versus live music revenue, based on figures from the BPI and PRS For Music (formerly the MCPS PRS Alliance, who handle all royalties from recorded and live performances). The evidence is clear: recorded music is now overshadowed by the vast amounts of money potentially available through the live sector – but nurturing and developing recorded music is still crucial for all artists who are seriously considering a career in music.

Looking to the future, it remains true that digital music continues to be the mainstay of many artists’ revenues. Whilst we at Revolver still love our albums, they’re incredibly inefficient from a cost perspective to manufacture, to store, to distribute… And while there are still some painfully obvious problems with the digital music industry as a whole, you cannot afford to ignore it.

Putting your best foot forward is incredibly important – making sure you have your material in pristine quality available on the digital stores to complement touring, gigs, any promotion you have coming up… Today, you must consider your digital music as on par with a vinyl or CD release. And, when it comes to finding someone to help get your music onto iTunes, 7Digital, Spotify et al, Revolver might be able to help you with that. Get in touch to find out more.