First half of 2009 for Ninthwave

First Half of the Year

OK so the past two months were pretty good for Ninthwave – (these are all digital sales – yes we still sell Cds, but not many honestly).
June 09 –
Tracks – 22,918
Albums 96
Streams 795
Perm DL – 1986
“Controlled” 16

Not bad, Smile.dk drove a lot of that (half the album sales for example). “Controlled” means ringtones and some sort of college program called Rukus.

May was even better –
Tracks – 13, 270
Albums – 127
Streams 11.251
Perm 2119
Controlled – 27

A couple of things- even though total tracks in May were almost half of what was sold in June, permanent downloads, the ones where you pay 89 or 99 cents, were actually about 100 more. Streams are in some ways worthless. Example, in June I got paid for 795 streams, a low number, but what did I get paid?

$21.53 or $0.027 cents a stream. Compare that to about $0.65 cents (it varies, sometimes more, usually less) for the permanent downloads.

So even though June saw more tracks “sold” May was a better month.

By the way, all of these reports are a little skewed. Sometimes services pay every three months, so when Pandora pays it means a huge bump in tracks (streams) even though month to month the sales don’t change much. One day I will sort by month for 2008, it can take 6 months for all services to report sales (or longer sometimes).

So how are we doing this year to date? Glad you didn’t ask.

Jan- June 09
Tracks 34,687
Albums 589
Streams 25,491
Perm – 9298
Controlled – 487
Streams were about 73% of track sales. In June the are 34%, in May 84%. See what is going on here? The number of streams may change radically percentagewise, but because the payout is so small it doesn’t matter in some ways.
In 2008 the first half looked like this:

Tracks – 18,133
Albums 283
Streams – 12.473
Permanent – 5639
Controlled – 304

Streams about 69% of sales. Notice a few things – for 2009 streams are way up, doubled in fact. But perms are up too, about 40% (eyeballing it). Album sales almost doubled too. So sales in real terms are up 40%, but streams are up 50%.

Now this is a sample of one, so pretty much useless and there are some confounding factors – the Smile.dk album and track sales may explain most/all of the bump. But it is interesting to see that streaming is picking up steam.

How are we compared to 2008?

2008 total year
Track – 41.569
Albums 613
Streams 29.819
Perm 11,643
Controlled 720
Streams were 71%

So far in 2009 (50% done) we have sold

83% of 2008 Tracks
96% of 2008 albums
80% of 2008 Permanent downloads

Wow, pretty good.