Music Ally

US music purchases rose 2.1% in 2009 according to Nielsen SoundScan – 1.54 billion albums, singles, videos and digital tracks. However, overall album sales were down 8.5% to 490 million, although digital album sales rose 16.1% to 76.4 million for the year.

Digital now accounts for 40% of all US music purchases. UMG took a 30.2% share of the overall album market, followed by Sony Music (28.6%), Warner Music Group (20.6%) and EMI (9.2%), with indie labels taking an 11.5% share.

Black Eyed Peas had the biggest-selling digital single with Boom Boom Pow (4.76 million units), while Lady Gaga had the top digital album with Fame’s 461,000 units.

Nielsen has been giving its annual presentation at the NARM conference, revealing the latest trends in digital music. It’s predicted that half of all recorded music unit purchases will be digital by the end of 2010, although in revenue terms, digital won”t overtake physical until 2011.

Nielsen also pointed out that just 35% of US album sales in 2008 were from new albums released that year – the lowest such percentage since it started collating sales using SoundScan. Catalogue digital albums were up 37% in 2008, compared to current digital albums rising by 27%. On the individual track front, 40% of all track sales in 2008 were from songs released in 2007 or 2008, with 60% classed as catalogue sales.

Nielsen also had bad music for SanDisk’’s slotMusic memory-card albums. It claims that 105,000 have been sold through Best Buy and Wal-Mart in the last seven and a half months, but that average weekly sales are down 65% since the start of 2009.