CDs are going the way of the 78s.
For the first time, digital music download sales will surpass CDs.
US digital music sales will rise to $3.4 billion this year, exceeding the $3.38 billion in revenue from CDs and vinyl, Strategy Analytics said in a report last week.
Globally, digital music will surpass physical purchases in 2015, the company said.
“Streaming-music services such as Spotify and Pandora will be the key growth drivers over the next five years as usage and spending grow rapidly,” Ed Barton, director of digital media at Strategy Analytics, said. “The industry will be hoping that digital can rebuild the US music market to something approaching its former stature.”
Record companies are licensing their artists’ catalogs to streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify to bolster shrinking CD revenues.
Sales of digital tracks and albums will rise 6.7 percent this year, while streaming revenue will climb 28 percent, the report said. Together they account for 41 percent of US music sales, compared with 22 percent worldwide.
Pandora, a public company, only serves US listeners, while Spotify, a privately held music service, streams music in 15 countries. –Post staff
Floored
It seems so surreal, like a scene out of the movie “The Graduate” — one word Paul: plastics.
Paul Pressler, who worked for Mickey Mouse, then succeeded retail icon Mickey Drexler, is now selling Formica flooring.
Pressler, who has been parked at private-equity shop Clayton Dubilier & Rice since 2009 following a disastrous tenure at the helm of The Gap, this week was named interim CEO of Wilsonart, a decorative-surfaces division of Illinois Tool Works.
“Wilsonart is extremely well-positioned for future growth,” Pressler said in an announcement of the decidedly unsexy new position he will take up in the fourth quarter.
Some industry insiders wondered whether Pressler finally may have found his true calling.
“(Pressler) never displayed much interest in clothes,” observed one former Gap exec.
Likewise, Pressler had been a hard-core number cruncher throughout his tenure at Disney through the ’90s, and seemed uninterested in the creative aspects of the theme parks he ran, according to some reports at the time. –James Covert
Got juice?
Giuliana Torre was a hardworking, hard-playing Merrill Lynch exec for more than a decade when she started a juice business on the side, to balance her Wall Street lifestyle of burning the candle at both ends. Now she is bringing her juices to New York trading floors.
She started her company, The Juicy Naam, in 2007 with $50,000.
“I went from trading stocks for 12 years, to trading vegetables,” she says.
Torre bought and set up her own farm stand and juice bar in East Hampton, a store in Sag Harbor — where Donna Karan or Christie Brinkley go for their daily fix and another locale on the Upper East Side at the Hotel Wales.
In the fall she’ll return to her roots and start delivering to the Merrill Lynch trading floor in the World Financial Center.
“They are a tough bunch, they like a lot of attention, and they love that we customize because some of them are big guys that eat a lot and drink coffee all day,” says Torre of her Merrill Lynch pals.
This season Torre launched her fresh juices out in Montauk, and she has plans to open other locales in the Hamptons, a larger store in NYC and one in LA.
Wall Street hedge funder Dan Loeb, who has a home in East Hampton, is a regular, as is Russell Simmons, who goes to the East Hampton locale first thing in the morning, Friday through Sunday. –Julie Earle-Levine
Home run
Who says there’s no recovery in the US housing market?
Trulia, an Internet startup focused on residential real estate, filed to raise $75 million in an initial public offering.
Trulia — owned by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital — is a rival to Zillow, which raised $69.2 million in its IPO in July 2011 and has seen its shares jump 86 percent since its market debut.
JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank are lead underwriters on the offering.–Post staff