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Digital albums, vinyl made a comeback in '09 while CDs slide [Article]

More numbers on album sales, countering some of the doom and gloom from the industry. Click the link below for more graphs...

Digital albums, vinyl made a comeback in '09 while CDs slide
Physical CD sales continued their slide into oblivion in 2009, but online sales remained strong, even if not quite as strong as 2008. Nearly everything online was up and everything physical was down—except for vinyl, which continues to have a fierce following.

By Jacqui Cheng | Last updated January 7, 2010 7:33 PM

2009 was a decently strong year for music—as long as you look at digital online sales and ignore the sinking ship that represents physical CDs. The US numbers are in from Nielsen SoundScan, and they are mostly a less-extreme version of the 2008 numbers, due in no small part to the struggling US economy. Still, the sales of physical media was way down while online media was way up, though vinyl enthusiasts are still bent on keeping their little niche alive—and are largely succeeding at it.

According to Nielsen's numbers for 2009, overall music sales were up a very modest 2.1 percent over 2008—this is a far cry from the 10.5 percent growth between 2007 and 2008, but growth nonetheless. When you split the numbers out, though, they are much more telling: music lovers bought nearly 1.16 billion digital tracks in 2009 (up 8.3 percent from 2008), and 76.4 million online digital albums (up 16.1 percent).

[From Digital albums, vinyl made a comeback in '09 while CDs slide]

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