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“30 billion illegal downloads in 2007“

“Even the most innovative business models are totally undermined by free music”

the American Music Industry has never been healthier.

they saw it as a marketing opportunity: fans of an artist were marketing that artist to other fans. Using the most powerful tool of all: the artist’s music.

What people don’t remember was that the original pricing was 99 cents per song, and $9.99 per album. After about a year, research showed that while people valued their downloads, they didn’t value them in the same way they valued physical media.

After all, one of the ongoing complaints about .mp3 files has always been sound quality, and with bandwidth increasing, storage getting cheaper, and portable devices supporting lossless formats, it only makes sense.

devices such as Apple’s iPod made songs easy to listen to anywhere.

It said it counted every 12 singles sold as one album, and that Apple probably received a boost during the two months by people cashing in iTunes gift cards – which Wal-Mart and other retailers also sell – received during the holiday season.

Apple launched iTunes in 2003, creating an online business model for a music industry that was struggling with plummeting CD sales and online piracy. In addition to selling albums, iTunes offered hundreds of thousands of individual songs for 99 cents each. That was ideal for customers who wanted to buy hot singles or old favorites without buying the whole album.

it reported $808 million in revenue for a category that includes iTunes store sales, a 27% jump from the same quarter the previous year.

Although Apple has given the music industry a new way to sell songs, it has become so powerful that music companies have sought to help create and fortify potential iTunes rivals.

online sales of singles from services such as Apple's iTunes were up 60 percent last year.

Apple reported the sale of its 100 millionth iPod.

The music industry has blamed piracy for the dive in CD sales and began suing downloaders and the file-sharing services in retaliation in 2003

the RIAA is about to sue students for illegal downloading.

CD sales peaked in 2000, with the major labels shipping $13 billion worth of discs to stores.

Sales dropped about 8 percent each following year, until a 2 percent uptick from 2003 to 2004.

resumed in 2005 and hit its lowest point in more than a decade last year, when music companies shipped $9.2 billion in CDs.

Last year, sales of albums bought on the Internet shot up 103 percent compared with 2005

worldwide sales of digital music grew by 40 per cent last year

CDs would continue to narrow.

"Record labels are continually diversifying and moving away from CDs because they know that fans have completely changed the way they are buying music.''

U.S. music sales, which peaked in 1999 at nearly $15 billion, dropped to $11.5 billion in 2006.

nearly 20 percent of U.S. internet users downloaded music illegally last year