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Music Stats for 2008 from Soundscan

The Nielsen Company Soundscan report for 2008 shows some interesting statistics. Legitimate digital sales continue to climb with some truly astonishing numbers.

• Music purchases (transactions) in 2008 reached 1.5 Billion, marking the fourth consecutive year music sales have exceeded 1 billion; 1.4 billion (2007) vs. 1.2 billion (2006) vs. 1 billion (2005).

• Overall Album sales (including Albums and Track Equivalent Album sales) declined 8.5% compared to 2007.

• Total Album sales declined 14% compared to 2007.

• Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” is the best selling Internet album for the year with 144,000 sales.

• During 2008, more Vinyl Albums were purchased (1.88 million) than any other year. The previous record was in 2000, with 1.5 million LP album sales.

• Digital Track sales break the 1 BILLION sales mark for the first time with more than 1,070,000 digital track sales. The previous record was 844 million digital track purchases during 2007; an increase of 27% over 2007.

• Digital Album sales reached an all-time high with more than 65 million sales in 2008; up from 50 million in 2007; an increase of 32% over the previous year.

• Digital album sales account for 15% of total album sales compared to 10% in 2007 and 5.5% in 2006.

• 2008 is the first time a digital song broke the 3 million sales mark in a single year. Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” and Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop.

• In 2008, there are 19 different digital songs with sales that exceeded 2 million compared to 9 in 2007.

• 71 Digital Songs exceed the 1 million sales mark for the year compared to 41 digital songs in 2007, 22 in 2006, and only 2 digital songs in 2005.

• Rihanna is the biggest selling digital artist in 2008 with nearly 10 million track sales compared to Fergie in 2007 who had 7.5 million track sales.

• There are more than 450,000 different physical albums that sold at least one copy over the Internet during 2008 compared to 390,000 in 2007. More long tail support.

We Welcome Your Comments

Comments

5 replies
  1. Pablo says:

    Hi David, Im a master student from Brazil and my thesis is about the phonographic industry. Could you get me the Nielsen Soundscan link from where this statistics were taken?

    Thanks a lot
    Pablo

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