Going by this EURweb report, during the first 6 months of this year, a Nielsen SoundScan report has found that the sales of music CDs have fallen by 15% so far this year, a 4% further drop compared to 2005. This is the now the 3rd year in a row where CD sales have fallen in the first half of the year.
Even though more music fans are turning to music download services, unfortunately for the music industry, they are still not making up for the drop in album sales. According to Telegraph news, overall music sales in the US with music downloads taken into account have fallen by 9.3% in the US and 7.7% in Britain, based on 10 single downloads being counted as one album.
The IFPI chairman John Kennedy claims that despite the 795 million legal tracks purchased in 2006, a whopping 20 billion further tracks were illegally downloaded also over the same year. On the other hand, the growth in digital music downloads is still strong with the first six months of this year seeing a 50% growth rate in legitimate music downloads. To help keep strengthen legal music downloads, the IFPI mentioned that its main challenge is to keep curbing illegal downloads.
