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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.''

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.

“There’s no money to be made from singles,”

Dozens of free networks emerged to let people copy songs from one another’s computers, drawing an estimated 63 million users in the U.S. alone by mid-2003.

Apple said the service sold its 50 millionth song March 15.

Some online music companies continue to struggle, but the sector is growing fast and steadily.

Analysts estimate that the services’ revenue will grow from about $65 million last year to $250 million in 2004, with $120 million or more from downloadable singles

CD sales totaled $11.2 billion in the U.S. last year

online customers are buying a much broader range of music than is being sold in stores.

about 75% of the paid downloads weren’t in Billboard’s Top 200 and about 60% were “catalog,” or older, tracks.

more than 63% of the CDs sold in stores last week were new releases.

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.

it will become even more critical to find new devices paradigms to capture consumer attention and new business models to sell content and services on those devices

iTunes and other online music retailers are also changing the way music is purchased. Hot and popular are now giving way to Independent artists who are just as likely and able to make their material available on iTunes and other internet resources.

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