German Music Revenues Up In 2013

BERLIN (VIP NEWS) — After 5 years of contraction, the German market for music sales has seen a small increase in revenue in 2013, as reported today by BVMI (Bundesverband Musikindustrie, Germany`s music industry association) in Berlin and the market research company media control GfK in a trend report. According to estimates, revenues from sales of physical and digital recordings, as well as the income from streaming services, increased about 1 percent to roughly €1.45 ($1.96) billion euro.

While the digital music market, as expected, increased about 12 percent, the physical business remained surprisingly stable with a decrease of only 2 percent. Details of how various aspects of the business have developed will be available in early March.

”The successful Holiday season and the big demand for physical records supported a positive development in the second half of the year," Dr. Florian Drücke, managing director of the BVMI, told Billboard. "The strategies of the industry and the diversity of options for music listening have gone down well with music fans. Nevertheless, we are still at the beginning of a path with a lot of unknowns — whether it will be possible to have a sustained increase in the future depends not only on the efforts of the music companies and the music services, but also that of the illegal use of music on the internet."

Dr. Mathias Gloth, managing director of media control GfK International: ”German artists have a great share of this positive development: Seven of the ten best-selling albums 2013 came from national artists. This is a great success. The new year confirms this trend: In the actual top 10 of the official album-charts there are German acts such as Helene Fischer, Max Herre, Adel Tawil, Andrea Berg and Tim Bendzko."