The music industry suffered quite an upheaval in 2008 and the trend for 2009 is more of the same: album sales are way down and digital downloads are way up. That means that the traditional album may be dead as a doornail before too long.
Physical album sales fell 20 percent to 362.6 million from 450.5 million, while digital album sales rose 32 percent to a record 65.8 million units.
Digital track sales, such as those conducted in Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store, were up 27 percent from last year, breaking the 1 billion mark for the first time at 1.07 billion.
The report continues a troubling trend for the recording industry, which has a harder time maintaining profits when consumers buy single songs instead of albums. The number of transactions rose 10.5 percent to 1.5 billion, although the figure treats single track and whole album purchases the same.
"You can see the overall unit sales as a positive, but their model is really built on album sales and that just continues to decline," said Silvio Pietroluongo, director of charts for Billboard magazine.
"Music consumption has never been at a higher clip, it's just a matter of trying to turn it into revenue," he added.
You know how there's always a few songs on every album that aren't as good as the others? Well, consumers don't want to buy those anymore: they want to pick and choose. That makes it much for difficult for artists to break out. After all, not every song can be a hit.
