Album sales down thanks to customers cherry-picking songs:
Nielsen Soundscan has released preliminary year-end album sales and music download numbers, and they look pretty much like we've come to expect over the last few years: America and the rest of the world is buying fewer traditional hard-copy CDs, and downloading more music.
Only 602.2 million albums found new owners this year, down from 650.8 million the year before. That's a seven percent slide, which is what you'll see reported in the straight-from-Reuters (or AP) releases on the topic. You'll also see that legal downloads increased from 134.2 million to 332.7 million, representing a whopping 148 percent year-over-year increase. However, that's where dark matter creeps into the equation:
Full-album downloads are counted under album sales along with other formats. Most digital downloads reflect single-track purchases.
This is an article from Dec. 2005 but it explains where we are currently with low album sales. Due to picking and downloading only the songs that are liked through ITunes and other legal sources, CD sales are way down. Only when you buy the entire album from these sites do they count as a full sale. Not to mention, the illegal downloading and bootlegging are killing the industry. Last year it was reported that "The Ma**acre" was illegally downloading over 7 million times, but 50 Cent still managed to sell over 8 million copies. Due to the present economy and the convenience of Internet downloading you have to be a major artist with a huge following to sell records today. Janet Jackson is one of the most popular artists of the last 15 years, and she has only managed just over 400k so far of her latest release. Fergie, of the popular group the Black Eye Peas has only managed 332,585 copies of her latest release. That's a shock because she's a part of a multi platinum group. Case and point - people are just downloading "London Bridge" and that doesn't count as an album sale.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051229-5864.html
