Music sales soar to 1.5 billion in '08

Welcome to 2009. I hope your first week of the new year has been a good one and may it be a better year for all of us.

It was only five years ago that gangsta rapper 50 Cent was shifting 7 million copies of his Get Rich Or Die Trying and only 10 years ago that Shania Twain was selling 10 million-plus copies of her Come on Over.

My how times have changed.

The 2008 year-end Nielsen numbers are out and record sales continue to plunge while digital sales continue to rise but they haven't quite yet met in the profitable middle. Overall music sales (including albums, singles, video and digital tracks) rose from 1.4 billion to 1.5 billion despite a drop in both total album sales and overall album sales. Unsurprisingly, digital tracks and digital album sales continue to grow, surpassing 1 billion and 65 million respectively, Soundscan records that will likely be broken next year.

Album sales were down in every major genre of music. The biggest losers were classical (those old folks just keep dying off), which fell 26 percent and country, which fell 24 percent. The country drop is a bit surprising given the year Taylor Swift had and the fact that other noncountry artists (Jon Bon Jovi, Darius Rucker and Jewel, for example) are trying to hoist themselves onto the country bandwagon.

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