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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.

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,”

Looks like a pillar of iTunes content might be on the brink of collapse -- Universal Music, the world's largest music business, has officially opted not to renew its contract with Apple for vending music on the iTunes Music Store. We don't know specifically what caused Universal to turn away -- perhaps it's the weight of the rising anti-DRM movement among consumers, or perhaps it's because of Stevie J.'s brash negotiating tactics, continual refusal to hand over iPod cash, or oceanic persistence in keeping tracks locked in at $0.99. Whatever the reason, we can't say we're all that surprised; Universal's been a pain in Apple's ass for years now. So what's the end result? Well, Universal music will still be sold through iTunes at will, so that means consumers can keep buying tracks for the time being, but Apple runs the risk of losing Universal's content on very short notice if the companies don't make happy with one another and put pen to paper once more.

Chinese Democracy topping 1.5 million in CD sales and downloads

after a half-century of people being able to purchase pop music and doing whatever they wished with those purchases, massive restrictions on computer files didn’t make sense to people.

“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.”

is reportedly preparing

The world's largest music corporation,

Vivendi's Universal Music Group

A year after Apple Computer Inc. launched its iTunes Music Service, the online music industry is selling songs by the millions

Customers at three of the leading online services – iTunes, Musicmatch Inc.’s Musicmatch Downloads and RealNetworks Inc.’s Rhapsody – buy about 10 times as many singles as they do albums. Offline, people buy 50 times more CDs than singles.

music lovers buying a few 99-cent singles instead of $15 CDs.

Sales from Apple's music-related products and services, which include iTunes, rose 38% from a year earlier to $832 million for the quarter ended Sept. 27

Apple sold 11.1 million iPods during the quarter, up 8% from a year earlier.

rising revenue from songs and albums bought on the Internet failed to offset the consumer flight from CDs.

CD sales was down 13 percent last year compared with 2005

the results from 2007 confirm what EMI's focus group showed: that the record industry's main product, the CD, which in 2006 accounted for over 80% of total global sales, is rapidly fading away.

the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007

For the first half of 2007, sales of music on CD and other physical formats fell by 6% in Britain, by 9% in Japan, France and Spain, by 12% in Italy, 14% in Australia and 21% in Canada.