Legal music downloads overtake single sales

Downloads overtake single sales (from BBC News).

This is hardly surprising since, as far as I know, sales of singles have been in free-fall for a while. The quality of music that seems to make up the vast majority of the singles chart suggests that the majority of sales are to 12–14 year olds anyway — a tech-savvy market that is bound to be attracted to 99p downloads.

News (same article) that album sales are up 2.6% over a “record 2003” suggests that downloads (of all forms, legal and illegal) aren’t hurting the music industry as much as it would like us to believe either.