Portugal singing a sorrowful tune

Last year Portugal gave a pitiful performance when it came to the sale of music, registering one of the worst results of all countries registered with the International Discography Industry Federation (IFPI).

Regarding sales of music in a physical format, such as CDs or DVDs, Portugal last year registered a drop of 34.4 percent, which makes it the country with one of the worst results in the world, surpassed only by Greece.
In 2011 recording companies sold around 4.4 million CDs and approximately 451,000 musical DVDs to music stores, according to data from the AFP, supplied to Lusa News Agency.
Within a decade, profits from the national Portuguese market shrank by more than 80 percent.
This was confirmed by the general-director of the Portuguese Recording Association (AFP), Educardo Simões.
The situation of “brutal drops” and consecutive decreases in profits for Portuguese record labels is worrying, Mr. Simões said, but what accentuates it is the discrepancy in relation to other countries and “a lack of measures to protect the sector.”
The main cause for the drop, according to Eduardo Simões, is digital piracy, the sharing and illegal downloading of music files via the internet as well as a lack of legal regulations within the matter.
Making matters worse is a reduction in consumers’ buying power, the tendency for artists to self-produce in terms of records, and a digital market which in this country is in an “unacceptably embryonic state in relation to technological development”, the IFPI’s report from March indicated.
“If we add a small market to the problems of negative growth that it has had over the past year, it affects any investor looking to the Portuguese market and that can have dramatic consequences in terms of culture”, the general-director said.
Despite the poor results and the “very deep crisis affecting the national market”, as Mr. Simões described it, the Portuguese are purchasing more Portuguese music than foreign. Since 2010 Portuguese music has made up 35 percent of all sales.
One of the reasons for this figure is the introduction of airtime quotas that Portuguese music is played on the radio.
“Overall, the quota of Portuguese music is larger and that is one of few positive indicators”, he said.
The AFP represents some of the largest record labels operating in Portugal, such as Sony, EMI and Universal.