MUMBAI: Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen BDS and Nielsen RingScan have announced their 2008 US year-end sales and performance monitoring data for the 52-week period 31 December, 2007 through 28 December, 2008.

Music purchases in 2008 reached 1.5 billion, marking the fourth consecutive year music sales have exceeded one billion (1.4 billion in 2007, 1.2 billion in 2006 and 1 billion in 2005). Music sales exceeded 65 million in the final week of 2008, representing the biggest sales week in the history of Nielsen SoundScan. The previous record was Christmas week 2007 with 58.4 million music purchases.

Overall album sales (including albums and track equivalent album sales) declined 8.5 per cent compared to 2007, whereas the total album sales declined 14 per cent compared to 2007. Metallica's Death Magnetic has been the best selling Internet album for the year with 144,000 sales. During 2008, more Vinyl Albums were purchased (1.88 million) than any other year in the history of Nielsen SoundScan. The previous record was in 2000, with 1.5 million LP album sales.

On the digital front, digital track sales break the one billion sales mark for the first time with more than 1,070,000 digital track sales. The previous record was 844 million digital track purchases during 2007; an increase of 27 per cent over 2007.

Digital Album sales reached an all-time high with more than 65 million sales in 2008; up from 50 million in 2007; an increase of 32 per cent over the previous year. Digital album sales accounted for 15 per cent of total album sales compared to 10 per cent in 2007 and 5.5 per cent in 2006.

In the final reporting week of 2008 the following digital sales records were broken:

1) Digital Track sales surpassed 47.7 million. The previous sales record was 42.9 million, week of 23 – 30 December, 2007.

2) Digital Album sales this week broke the two million mark for the first time with sales of 2.4 million sales; breaking the previous record of 1.9 million (20 December, 2007).

3) The top 200 digital songs for the week posted an all-time high with 13.6 million sales; breaking the previous record of 11.9 million during the last week of 2007.

4) The first time that the Top 5 digital songs...

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