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TechRadar tallies up the (huge) quantity of unsold digital tracks

9:20 a.m. · December 26, 2008 · by Tony Sclafani

The U.K.'s TechRadar recently noted that some ten million digital music tracks are lying around unsold.  Significantly, they mention that when it comes to albums, "a staggering 1.23 million albums were made available with just 173,000 bought." That means 85 per cent of artists who released albums sold nothing or next to nothing. People are mostly buying music by artists with whom they're familiar

As some commenters over at Digg have noted, this is nothing new. People have always bought music by only a few artists. But in the old days, record stores had cut-out bins, where they'd earmark poor-selling albums, cassettes, or CDs for cheap sale. TechRadar doesn't come out and say it, so we will: we need a digital version of the cut-out album. There's no sense letting potentially good music go to waste on hard drives and servers.