Sales of physical CD’s in the United States plummeted 20% in the first three months of 2007, compared to the same period in 2006, as online downloading of songs continued to take over.
89 million CD’s were sold from the start of the year through March 18 as compared with 112 million CD’s sold during the same period in 2006, according to Nielsen SoundScan report released Wednesday. Sales of individual songs in digital format on the Internet rose from 242 million tracks during those months last year to 288 million this year, according to SoundScan.
Consumers are sending a clear message to artists that “while you may have put a lot of thought into the sequence of the album, I only like these three songs,” said industry analyst Michael McGuire of Gartner Research.
