Scary music business album sale numbers

I have long admired the work of Paul Resnikoff over at Digital Music News. Impartial, well balanced and thoughtful analysis of the music business.

As I played music my whole life and worked in the industry for more than a decade I have more than a passing interest in music biz fortunes.

Anyhow, Resnikoff published a few stats presented at New Music Seminar in New York. Scary numbers that will parallel in the book biz as more and more digital content goes online:

Albums that sold at least one copy in 2009: 98,000

Albums selling more than 10,000 units in 2009: 1,319

Albums selling more than 10,000 units in 2008: 1,515

Albums selling more than 250,000 units in 2009: 85

Albums selling more than 250,000 units in 2001: 214

Albums selling more than 5,000 units in 2009: 2,058

Albums selling under than 1,000 units in their first year of release: 92,601

Number of albums selling less than 100 copies in 2009: 81,000

Paul recently added a discussion/forum to his site, which you’ll find here:
http://digitalmusicnews.com/stories/072110nmsstats