Music companies make up for lower CD sales with singles and ringtones

Sales of individual song downloads are eroding the underpinnings of the CD and remixing the industry's economics, reports the IHT, in an interesting and lengthy article on the music industry's new business model.

Some interesting facts and figures:

-- Album sales are down 4.6 percent this year, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. Sales at digital-music services like iTunes continue to rise, but the pace of the increase has slowed compared with last year. Still, if every 10 individual tracks sold online are counted as albums, overall recorded music sales are off only by about 0.7 percent this year."

-- More and more, it is looking toward sales of bite-size units — individual songs typically sell for 99 cents — instead of full albums that may sell for $15 at record shops.

-- Barring a late surge in CD sales, more digital tracks than CDs will be sold in the United States for the first time this year.

emily | 6:46 PM | Random Stats |
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