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No One Buying CDs in Stores Anymore?

Online Purchases Grow While Offline Fall

A new report from AP confirms that which we already knew: Online music sales are soaring while offline sales are plummeting. Sales figures for the first half of the year have been released, showing that 229.8 million albums were sold, which is a decrease of 15 percent over the same period last year. Meanwhile, 417.3 million tracks were sold online in those six months, a huge increase of 49 percent from last year.

However, if you combine the offline and online figures, overall sales of music are still down nine percent, a factor most contribute to people being able to pick and choose which tracks they want from a given album. If you can just purchase the two or three songs you like for a few bucks rather than the whole album for $10, that's a considerable hit to the industry's bottom line. Perhaps that will result in a shift away from the music industry's focus on hit singles to a focus on hit albums.

We'd be happiest if it just focused on good music.

From The New York Times

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Tags: Album Sales, AlbumSales

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