Digital downloads, the bane of the music industry a decade ago, has finally become its savior.
While the music industry continues its steep decline for sales of the physical CD, the digital download has taken up the slack.According to Nielsen SoundScan, digital track sales in the first half of 2006 had a 77% increase over the previous year.
Digital album sales are up 126% year to date over the same period in 2005.
However, new music CD sales are down considerably.
The biggest selling CD so far in 2006 is the High School Musical soundtrack. It has sold 2,620,801 units.
By comparison, the biggest selling CD of the first half of '05 was 50 Cent's ‘The Massacre' which did 4,022,324 units in the same period.
The Top 200 sales for 2006 dropped to 85.4 million compared to 93 million for the same period in '05.
Digital tracks are saving the music industry. Sales are up 77% with more than 280 million units sold, compared to a total of 353 million for the entire year of 2005.
Digital tracks are averaging 10.7 million sales a week compared to 6.7 million in 2005.
Digital album sales are up 126% compared to the same period last year. CD album sales are down 4.2%.
The good news is that by the end of the year, it is estimated than more than 1 billion units of music will sell in the USA.
