It took longer than I thought it would (because physical music sales still makes the monies) but digital music sales has finally topped physical music sales. According to Nielsen and Billboard, digital music sales accounted for 50.3% of total music sales, more than half the pie. What took so long?
Well, even though physical music sales has been trending downwards (5% down in 2011) compared to digital music sales (8.4% up), physical album sales still outsell digital album sales (sorta makes sense, people still like buying albums). The difference has been that the growth of digital singles has finally grown big enough to overcome the album gap. After all, it makes a heck of a lot more sense to buy a single mp3 over a single CD or cassette or vinyl or 8track, right? Check out the full Nielsen report here. [BusinessWire via CNN, Image Credit: demarcomedia/Shutterstock]
