Digital leads music sales growth

Digital music, long the bane of the music industry, may finally be something that record label executives can smile about.

For 2008, total music sales rose 10 per cent to 1.51 billion units sold, up from 1.36 billion units the year before, according to industry tracker Nielsen. Units tallied include physical albums, digital albums and tracks, and music videos.

The biggest contributor to the growth was digital music, Nielsen reported. There were 1.07 billion digital tracks sold in 2008, up 27 per cent from 2007, and there were 65.8 million digital albums sold, up 32 per cent.

Those numbers square with recent reports on music downloads. For the third quarter, for instance, legal music downloads from sites such as iTunes and AmazonMP3 were up 29 per cent from the same period a year earlier, according to NPD Group.

All told, according to Nielsen, the number of albums sold - including CDs, LPs, and digital albums - fell 14 per cent to 428 million in the year just ended. Physical albums sold through e-commerce sites fell 8.6 per cent to 27.5 million units from 2007 to 2008.

Universal Music Group came out on top among record labels for total album sales in 2008 (31.5 per cent market share, down ever so slightly from 2007) as well as for digital albums and digital tracks (market shares of 27.8 per cent and 31.8 per cent, respectively). Sony BMG was second overall, with 25.3 per cent of all album sales for the year, Nielsen said.

The top-selling digital song for 2008 was "Bleeding Love" from Leona Lewis, with 3.4 million units sold, while Rihanna was the top-selling digital artist, with 9.9 million units sold.

Radiohead claimed top honours in the vinyl realm, both as an artist and for one of its albums. The rock band sold 61,200 vinyl albums during the year, of which 25,800 were its In Rainbows album. In 2007, In Rainbows was the focal point of an experiment by Radiohead to let people pay whatever they saw fit to download the album.

Nielsen noted that vinyl sales set a record in its SoundScan era, at 1.88 million units sold, beating the previous record of 1.5 million from 2000. (Nielsen SoundScan tracks point-of-purchase sales of recorded music.)