Record Sales Down 11% Since Last Year

While artists and record labels will always use album sales as the barometer of their efforts behind the scenes, the early figures for 2008 prove what many analysts predicted all along: fewer people are buying physical albums. June serves as the midpoint for the calendar year, and so far Nielsen SoundScan shows physical album sales at 206.4 million units. That number is an 11 percent drop from last year's figures.
Meanwhile digital sales continue to soar. Digital album sales have increased by 34 percent, and digital singles have shown a 30 percent increase to 31.6 million units as proven by Flo Rida's record-setting January. The T-Pain assisted single "Low" set a digital sales record by selling 470,000 copies in a single week.
Ironically, while Hip Hop sales have usually taken the worst beating in the recent four-year, industry wide sales slump, Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III has been the year's best-selling album. Tha Carter III boasts sales of 1.5 million despite being heavily pirated on the Internet. Mariah Carey's E=MC2 (1.1 million) and Jack Johnson's Sleep Through the Static (1.2 million) are the only other albums to sell over 1 million copies. All three albums are also distributed by Universal Music Group, making UMG the leader among the four major labels. Coldplay’s Viva La Vida (971,000) and Spirit (830,000) by Leona Lewis round out SoundScan’s list of the year's five best-selling albums.




We can all thank the internet to this.

idk think 100% of this is cuz of the internet....

Oh definately the new motto is if you ain't Wayne "you ain't sellin" hah really. Sales just suck now.

thank lil wayne..... he's was biggest thing on the internet for atleast a full year & maybe a lil more..
The whole lil wayne mixtape era introduced everybody to the leaks; and everybody not usin the web for that shit before are probably usin the web for it now. Ya digg?

but otherwise I'm not surprised... downloading shit for free is almost everybody's way to go now.....