The Vinyl Rundown

Mid-year Sales Report:

Album Sales Down Less Than In 2007

Nielsen Soundscan has released a mid-year update on recorded music sales (taken from this Billboard.biz article, which has many different numbers than Variety's article...possibly different accounting for major-owned indie distribution?). Here's a brief rundown of the year-over-year stats for the first half of 2008:

• Album sales were down 11% to 204.6 million. That is an improvement over the 15.1% deficit at this time last year.

• CD sales were down 16.3% to 31.6 million.

• Vinyl sales increased 77% to 803,000.

• Digital album sales rose 34% to 31.6 million units and now account for 15.4% of all album sales.

• Digital tracks increased 30% to 532.7 million. They were up 49% at last year's mid-way point.

• Market shares: Universal Music Group had 31.2% (down from 31.5%), Sony BMG had 25% (down from 25.3%), Warner Music Group had 20.8% (up from 20%), EMI had 9.4% (down from 10.4%) and indies collectively accounted for 13.9% (up from 12.9%).

Source: http://www.coolfer.com/blog/