Digital sales for music in Australia have never been higher and the combination of Christmas and the iPod has accelerated that.
Music sales for single tracks last week accounted for 84.3% of the Top 40. In the week before, digital sales made up 62% of the chart and 61.8% the week before that.Of the 197,821 Top 40 singles sold last week in Australia, 166,899 were digital and only 30,922 were physical CDs.
In the previous week, 48,437 CDs sold compared to 79,248 digital tracks on total sales of 127,685 for the Top 40.
81.3% of the 21,116 units sold for this week's number one song 'Apologize' by Timbaland were digital. 'Apologize' sold 17,172 downloads. At No. 6, 99.4% of Timbaland's 'The Way I Are' sales were downloads.
The digital download also put Silverchair right back in the Top 40. 98.2% of the sales of their single 'Straight Lines' were digital. On the 42 physical CD sales the same song sold, it song did not even make the Top 100 physical CD chart.
For the overall Top 100, 85.9% of sales were digital. Some titles even charted without selling a single CD single.
A number of songs in the Top 100 sold 100% as download sales with zero for CD sales.
They were:
No. 44 '1234' by Feist
No. 49 'Crank That' by Soula Boy
No. 67 'Long Road To Ruin' by Foo Fighters
No. 69 'Sleep Through The Static' by Jack Johnson
No. 73 'Rehab' by Amy Winehouse
No. 75 'Nobody Knows' by Powderfinger
No. 87 'Open Your Eyes' by Snow Patrol
No. 98 'Stranger' by Hilary Duff.
The news is both positive and negative for the music industry. It certainly heralds the death of the CD single but the music industry cannot survive on $1.69 purchases alone.
The trend is yet to carry over to albums. Only 2.1% of the 555,944 album sales from last week's Top 100 were digital.
1.8% of the 410,593 units in the Top 40 albums and 1.4% of the 175,921 units in the Top 10 albums were digital sales.
