Album Dead - Sales Plummet To Lowest Total In Decades

NEW YORK (Top40 Charts) - For the week ending May 30, the U.S. music industry sold a total of 4,984,000 albums, according to Nielsen Soundscan. This figure, which includes new and catalog releases, represents the fewest number of albums sold in one week since Soundscan began compiling this data in 1994. By comparison, album sales for the week ending May 31, 2009, totaled 5.76 million. The highest one-week tally recorded during the Soundscan era is 45.4 million albums, in late December, 2000.

The top selling album this week was Glee: The Music, Vol. 3, which moved 74,000 copies in its second week.

For the same week last year, sales were at 5.76 million. That week saw Eminem's Relapse move 211,000 copies for its second week at No 1.

By comparison, the highest one-week tally in the Soundscan era is 45.4 million albums, which was achieved in late December of 2000. Both The Beatles' 1 and The Backstreet Boys' Black & Blue were hot at the time.

Then again, "Who the hell knows what weekly sales were back then," said Lou Dennis, who retired as Warner Bros. Records head of sales in 1996.

The news has renewed an ever renewing battle cry from the major record label industry: Universal Music Group Distribution president Jim Urie told the magazine this is "all the more reason why everyone in the industry should be focused on getting the U.S. Congress to introduce legislation that makes the Internet service providers our allies in fighting piracy. Piracy is getting worse and worse and the government needs to focus on that."

Sales have been steadily declining since 2000, though that year was host to the strongest sales week in the SoundScan era: 45.4 million albums were sold during the holiday shopping season in December that year.

In the meantime, the digital tracks sales are their own charting entity. A bunch of track purchases separate do not equal the purchase of an album. The purchase of an album is the purchase of a full album, whether digitally or from retail shops.
In other words what in music industry magazines is written stands, just know that 21.7 million digital track purchases don't factor into the album tally.

However, by the fact that the web and MP3 sales means that acts who weren't actually releasing albums before can now do so. So, of the 97,751 released in 2009, how many had no actual record label or hard copy sales? Those are probably albums that would not have been "released" had it not been for the web. What did the raw numbers and the percentages look like before 2006?
Don't get us wrong. As a-top industry magazine not saying that things may not be bad for record sales. We just want to make sure we're comparing apples to apples!