The RIAA has released some year end sales statistics for 2003, that reveal what
is hot in optical content and what isn't doing as well. These numbers
indicate that even when faced with the technological superiority of DVD-A and
Super Audio CD, that plain vanilla stereo CD is still the King of the hill.
Nearly 756 milion discs were sold overall last year, which is down about 7
percent when compared to sales in 2002.
 DVD-Audio sales remained stagnant in 2003, with a 0.08
percent increase in sales to approximately 400,000, says the RIAA's '2003
Yearend Statistics" report. Sales for DVD-Audio discs were first tracked
in 2001 at about 300,000 units and increased to 400,000 units in 2002.
Music industry executives point out that these numbers could be slightly
on the low side, because Soundscan allegedly has yet to track DVD-Audio
sales on the Internet, which is currently the best place for fans of the
format to purchase discs. Nevertheless, total DVD-Audio total sales at
this point are many hundreds of times less than that of the
CD.
 SACD
sales were tracked for the first time in 2003, showing 1.3 million discs
sold during the year. 2003 marked the year where high-profile 'hybrid"
SACD titles (which play on CD players and were marketed in the CD bins of
many record stores) from Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. The
backwards compatibility of SACD, more aggressive marketing and PR, coupled
with big name albums being released in 2003, helped SACD outsell DVD-Audio
by 3.25 times in 2003, according to RIAA year-end sales
numbers.
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In another interesting study, Peter Hart
Research gave 2900 phone interviews with music consumers (error rate
reported at +/- 1.8 percent), which showed that there is
a significant increase in market share for DVD-Audio. DVD-Audio's
market share has increased from 1.1 percent in 2001 to 1.3 percent in 2002. In
2003, DVD-Audio's market share rose to 2.7 percent. However, this was not
due to increased sales of DVD-A, but rather by a significant decrease
in the overall sales of CDs.
Source: Audio Revolution
