U.S. Music Sales, 1975-2005: Vinyl, cassettes, and CDs

How about digital sales?
It surely figures into the decline of CD sales.

Bill -

The RIAA didn't start reporting digital sales until 2004 (i.e. the introduction of iTunes, first time that there was a legal music download service that generated a meaningful amount of revenue).

The RIAA download numbers for 2004 - 2006 downloads are:
2004: 4,600,000 albums
2005: 13,600,000 albums
2006: 27,600,000 albums

But it's important to note that those numbers don't include single-track downloads, which the RIAA reports as:
2004: 139,400,000 tracks
2005: 266,900,000 tracks
2006: 586,400,000 tracks

For some additional context, in the best year ever for CD singles (1997), 66,700,000 tracks were sold...less than half of the first year digital singles number, which has been on a steep upward curve since.

I'm actually pulling together some more data on this topic, and will get it up on Swivel in the next week or so.

Hey Whitney,

Nice graphy...how about adding key points in music history (in particular intro of Napster, shutdown of Napster, intro of itunes etc.)

I'd be real curious to see how those and other points tie into music sales.

Napster launched in June 1999.

Singles are actually very important for the analysis of the graph above. Especially in terms of online music services. Is there anyone who got any data on singles sales?

Heyy Joha, yeah i do have some info on singles. The CD's best year sold about 66 million CD's but in the first year the single was introduced, singles sold double the amount. Single are very important as it forces the artists to produce more quality songs and not just fill ins.

hey, where did you get the info?
riaa records only go back to 1989?

doing an essay on this, would be really grateful if you replied. thanks

I guess, you might add a forecast of the end of the CD life cycle to the graph. Approximately 2015?