Opinion: The music industry’s up and down year

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Music sales figures from Nielsen SoundScan show that, for the first time, the number of downloadable albums sold (32.6 million) more than offset the decline in physical CD sales (-30.7 million) in 2006. The overall picture wasn’t particularly good, but the results suggest that we’ve reached the point where 99-cent downloads can fill the void left by slumping plastic-disc sales. Read more about this at the Bit Player blog.