Music downloads growing faster than reported

calidan

The final numbers are in, and while the sales numbers for legally downloaded music got a nice Christmas boost, the overall picture didn't change much—the CD is still king in the music biz. But some of the new information lets us finish the calculations I started back in December, and it looks like the big studios still don't seem to know that a freight train is about to hit them.

Let's start with the hard facts. The week between Christmas and New Year's saw a record-breaking 20 million songs downloaded through services like iTunes and Rhapsody (single tracks only, mind you, but more on that in a moment), which brought up the full-year totals to 352 million songs downloaded. That's a very healthy 149 percent increase over last year's 141 million. Meanwhile, CD sales huffed and puffed their way to 620 million units sold, down 7.2 percent from 666 million (no, really) in 2004. The 20 million one-week burst was fueled by Saint Nick, of course, as all those music store gift cards needed to be cashed in, and all those shiny, new MP3 players were hungry for content. MP3 players out-sold personal CD players last year, for the first time ever, and there is no going back now.

That's all well and good, but I said as much not three weeks ago. This final round of sales reporting contains some data that was missing on the last go-around, however. Specifically, there were 16 million full-album downloads, and that information allows me to clean up my numbers, remove some of the guesswork, and give you the straight story on the CD-to-downloads conversion rate.
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Read More / Source: ars technica