It took longer than I thought it would (because physical music sales still makes the monies) but digital music sales has finally topped physical music sales. According to Nielsen and Billboard, digital music sales accounted for 50.3 per cent of total music sales, more than half the pie. What took so long?
Well, even though physical music sales has been trending downwards (down 5 per cent in 2011) compared to digital music sales (up 8.4 per cent), physical album sales still outsell digital album sales (sorta makes sense — people buy albums). The difference has been the growth of digital singles which has finally grown big enough to overcome the album gap. After all, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to buy a single mp3 over a single CD or cassette or vinyl or 8track, right? Check out the full Nielsen report here. [BusinessWire via CNN]
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