Hard times singing for their supper

Brooke Fraser's third album, Flags, entered the New Zealand Top 40 Album chart this month with gold status. Photo / Supplied

New Zealand's music industry is falling on hard times as retail sales slow and digital purchases fail to make up for the shortfall, chart compilers say.

Brooke Fraser's third album, Flags, entered the New Zealand Top 40 Album chart this month with gold status.

An album must have more than 7500 record sales to reach gold status and more than 15,000 to be declared platinum.

The Top 40 Album Chart is based on retail sales - both physical and digital - from music retailers throughout the country.

Radioscope, which compiles data for New Zealand's music charts, was unable to give the Herald exact figures for record sales but said the sale of music was in decline.

On the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (Rianz) website, figures for gold and platinum album sales highlight the decline in consumer purchase.

For the month of August 2009, 19 albums featured in the Top 40 chart had reached gold status, while platinum levels of record sales had been achieved 183 times.

This means the minimum number of record sales for albums featured on the Top 40 for the month was 2,887,500.

In August this year, 35 albums in the Top 40 reached gold status but platinum status was achieved only 65 times.

The minimum number of music sales for that month was therefore 1,237,500 - 1.65 million fewer than in the same month one year earlier.

The chart compiler for Radioscope, Paul Kennedy, said the trend had been obvious to him for a while.

"It's true to say music sales are dropping and the decline has been noticeable for some time. Digital sales are picking up but not at a rate that replaces the drop in physical record sales."

Suggestions that illegal downloading of music were to blame were only part of the problem, Mr Kennedy said.

"There are fewer retailers around now than there were 10 years ago. So the physical places to buy have dropped and it's reflected in sales."

People do not browse through music stores the way they used to, Mr Kennedy said.

"File sharing has had a big effect. Obviously it puts record sales behind."

Rianz promotes an anti-piracy campaign on its website.

It suggests listeners adopt a moral stance for appreciating music that "demonstrates fairness and respect for each other's creative rights".

"Have you thought that when you buy an illegal CD copy, or download music for free, none of your hard-earned cash goes to the artist? It goes into the pockets of the person who sold you the poor-quality CD. Where's the sense in that? The artist receives nothing. Is that what you want?"

Although record sales are low, New Zealand's music scene is faring better than its Aussie counterpart.

The Sun Herald reported last week that British hardcore metal band Bring Me the Horizon had debuted at number one on the Aria album charts, despite having sold just 3600 albums nationally. This was the lowest number of record sales to achieve number-one-album status in Australian music history.