Paid music Web downloads triple in first half

[Bellamy]

Paid music Web downloads triple in first half

 

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - While U.S. album sales are off 7 percent year-to-date, songs sold over the Web through paid downloads have tripled in the first half of the year, music tracker Nielsen SoundScan said on Tuesday.

 

Internet users in the U.S. downloaded 158 million individual songs from services like Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes during the first half of the year, compared with 55 million in the year-ago period, SoundScan said.

 

U.S. album sales, including downloads, fell 2.5 percent to 301.2 million units in the first half from 309 million a year earlier. Those figures included downloaded tracks equivalent to about 17.6 million albums this year and 6 million last year.

 

Sales of albums, excluding these new digital formats, fell 7 percent to 282.6 million units.

 

Single-song downloads now represent 6 percent of overall music sales, compared with less than 2 percent a year ago, according to the data.

 

The recording industry has been embroiled in a fierce battle against online piracy over peer-to-peer networks, recently scoring a big victory with a Supreme Court ruling that found such networks could be held liable for piracy if they encourage unauthorized copying of music or other content.

Source: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle....OUNDSCAN-DC.XML