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51 per cent of its earnings over the past year came from digital sales.

falling CD sales and illegal downloading.

"Some fans only want to buy the physical disc, some only want to buy a ringtone and a T-shirt, others just want a concert ticket, others want to buy a digital album.

"worst decline in the history of the CD."

Physical album sales have plunged about 27% so far in the fourth quarter

Digital tracks sales are up

digital revenues have overtaken earnings from physical sales.

more digital downloads were sold in the US last year than physical products, they accounted for just a fraction of overall music industry revenues.

Making money from digital recordings has become the music industry's biggest challenge as it faces up to falling CD sales and a persistent piracy problem.

“In 2007… Physical sales of CDs and DVDs fell 13 percent to $15.9 billion. Sales of downloaded songs and mobile-phone ringtones rose 34 percent to $2.9 billion.“

“piracy is killing the record industry”

“physical and digital piracy cost the U.S. music industry alone $5.3 billion“

after a devastating fall in CD sales over the past several years

Digital downloads are spurring growth at Universal Music and had its parent company recently crowing

Digital downloads are spurring growth

Digital music was a $1.3 billion business in 2007, but it still only comprised 10 percent of consumer music spending

compete with Apple and the future of music CD sales.

“The challenge remains for the industry to find new ways to compete with Apple, who remains the dominant player for portable media devices,”

worldwide digital music sales rose to $2.9 billion last year, from $2.1 billion a year earlier. That was about 15 percent of overall sales, up from 11 percent a year earlier and less than 1 percent in 2003.

yet to make up for the shortfall in sales of compact discs

sales of recorded music fell about 10 percent last year, to $17.6 billion

Born on January 4, 1809, Coupvray, France, Braille was accidentally blinded in one eye at the age of three. Within two years, a disease in his other eye left him completely blind.

Captain Charles Barbier invented sonography, or nightwriting, a system of embossed symbols used by soldiers to communicate silently at night on the battlefield. Inspired by a lecture Barbier gave at the Institute a few years later, the fifteen-year-old Braille adapted Barbier's system to replace Haüy's awkward embossed type, which he and his classmates had been obliged to learn.

In his initial study, Braille had experimented with geometric shapes cut from leather as well as with nails and tacks hammered into boards. He finally settled on a fingertip-sized six-dot code, based on the twenty-five letters of the alphabet, which could be recognized with a single contact of one digit. By varying the number and placement of dots, he coded letters, punctuation, numbers, diphthongs, familiar words, scientific symbols, mathematical and musical notation, and capitalization. With the right hand, the reader touched individual dots and, with the left, moved on toward the next line, comprehending as smoothly and rapidly as sighted readers. Using the Braille system, students were also able to take notes and write themes by punching dots into paper with a pointed stylus which was aligned with a metal guide.

Album sales dropped for a seventh consecutive year, but a dramatic increase in the sale of digital tracks helped keep the music industry afloat in 2006.

"High School Musical" is the first soundtrack to become the No. 1 album since "Titanic" sold 9.3 million copies in 2002, a feat that should have Disney -- an indie in the recorded music field -- smiling.

aimed at tweens

Apple Inc. has surpassed Wal-Mart to become America’s No. 1 music store, the first time that a seller of digital downloads has ever beaten the big CD retailers.

Video game companies and other software makers are selling more of their products as downloads rather than CDs.

Songs could be downloaded faster than movies or TV shows, both legally and illegally.

Chinese Democracy topping 1.5 million in CD sales and downloads

the American Music Industry has never been healthier.

“People don’t realize it,” said Stamphammer in a recent interview, “but we started planning for this back during the teen-pop era. In fact, remember when that N’Sync album sold 1.1 million copies in its first week? 50,000 of those were digital files.”

Sales of CDs fell almost 9 percent in 2002 and are expected to be down this year an additional 6 percent.

Instead of buying music, fans are flocking to online services like Kazaa that allow users to digitally swap songs free.

knows how to smile for “all the different

all the different camera

digital cameras,

The reasons are partly technical, but the bottom line is that this asset class is perhaps the most compelling investment opportunity in today's marketplace. I expect equitylike returns, well into double digits, over the next year or two. And everyday investors can easily target these bonds with mutual funds and exchange-traded funds.

"It's cheap to buy used discs. . . . They sound just the same as new ones,"

Amazon.com

The industry worries that the expanding used market is cannibalizing new-CD sales, as well as promoting piracy by allowing consumers to buy, record and sell back discs while retaining their own digitally pristine copies.