Some Good News for the Music Industry (for a change)

Posted on Aug 1, 2011 in Music by stainless 24 Comments

Apple-music

[SitM: the other interesting note is that only 1 out of three purchases in the US is digital. The rest are still CDs! Old habits and ingrained ways die hard. Still, digital sales are up 19%. The writing that's been on the wall for 6 years gets bolder]

Although marginal, figures for the first six months of the year show total album sales were up 1% on the same period in 2010.

Adele has led the fight with the biggest-selling album of the year there so far. Her album 21 has sold more than 2,517,000 copies Stateside.

The London singer has also sold 314,000 copies of her debut album 19 in the US.

Joining Adele in the top five are albums by Lady Gaga, Mumford & Sons, Jason Aldean and Bruno Mars, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

However, on two separate occasions during the first week of its release Lady Gaga’s second album Born This Way was priced at 99c (approximately 60p) by digital retailer Amazon.

More physical CDs were sold than downloads but digital sales were up by 19% compared to the same time last year.

In the US, download album sales still only account for one out of every three albums sold.