Digital finally overtakes physical in US music market

It’s a moment that many tech industry observers have predicted for the best part of a decade: the US music market is now more digital than physical, by volume at least.

According to figures from Nielsen SoundScan and Billboard magazine, digital music unit sales accounted for 50.3 per cent of all music purchases in 2011, the first time that threshold has been crossed in the world’s largest music market. The US is more advanced in digital than most of Europe. In the UK, figures this week showed that digital albums still account for less than a quarter of the market, although downloads of individual tracks far outstrip CD singles. One in three albums is digital in the US, while Americans bought 100m more digital tracks overall in 2011 than the prior year, up 8.4 per cent. Rap, electronic, latin and even country albums saw the biggest increases in US digital album sales, outpacing the overall average growth of 20 per cent. But in spite of the digital growth, there are signs that the decline of CDs is slowing.