Despite another triple digit percent surge in music downloads, CD sales are still tops in the music industry. Come next year though, a dramatic change may be inevitable.At the very least, the recently released 2005 stats seem to point towards that trend. 352 million digital tracks were sold in 2005 via legal music downloads services such as iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster - the features and differences are covered in www.download-latest-online-music.com. The use of these services has increased in comparison to 2004 which saw 142.6 million downloads. Over 20 million tracks were downloaded on legal music downloads services in the last week of 2005 alone.

According to tracking firm Nielsen SoundScan, this figure shatters the previous record for legal downloads in one week. That record, 9.5 million tracks, was set the previous week. The sharp rise in music downloads during that week was due to the same rationale responsible for the rise in Christmas 2004: gift vouchers. The only difference noted is that over three times as many tracks were purchased in the final week of 2005 than exactly one year before.Due to hype surrounding hip hop star Kanye West's remark regarding U.S. President George W.

Bush, helped boost West's "Gold Digger" to a record 80,500 downloads on the week ending September 17, 2005. This record stood until the week ending January 1, 2006 when 15 tracks surpassed that record.The new record was posted by the Hot Digital Tracks chart topper, "Laffy Taffy" by rap group D4L, selling 175,000 tracks. Yearly CD sales continued their downward trend since 1999. The final CD sales tally: 620 million, down 46 million from 2004's 666 million. However, about 2.6% of all "CD albums" sold were actually full-album downloads; in other words, about 16 million.

This latter tally was not incorporated into the 352 million units total above since that sum was based on individual download tracks. Considering the average number of tracks per album is about 11.5, that would add 184 million to the total bringing the final aggregate sum to over half a billion downloads. Correspondingly, the number of MP3 players sold also rose to the point that their sales surpassed those of CD players for the first Christmas season in history. Purchasing digital tracks is handy dandy in terms of cost and saving space. But if they are to be heard, fans need something to play them on.

On that note, for the very first time in history, the sales of MP3 players surpassed the during the Christmas shopping season.The news is encouraging for the digital music downloads industry, however technology and distribution executives at the major labels criticize the surge of downloads during Christmas week being due to gift vouchers. They were further quick to point the 20% drop in sales that followed the first week of 2005. However, a similar drop in the first week of 2006 would put the tally at 16 million per week, which could put 2006 as the first year to surpass the 1 billion mark in legal music downloads in one year. So where are digital music downloads relative to other forms of distribution? It is easy to see from the stats that digital sales are poised to take over physical forms of distribution, but CD manufacturers should not give up their day jobs yet. Digital formats are still in the shadow of their physical counterparts.Geoff Mayfield, director of charts at Billboard, sums up the trend as follows: "Digital distribution represents the future and it represents optimism.

At the same time, the album the physical albumcarries the mail. While downloads are sexy and they certainly had a robust year of growth [...] physical albums are still the moneymaker."But could the "sexy" digital music industry eventually give the kiss of death to CD's as we know it? As with other forms of media in the past, its demise is inevitable. But the prominent voices in the music distribution industry are not pessimistic about the prominence of CDs as it stands. At least not yet. Visit www.download-latest-online-music.com for more information regarding reputable sources for music downloads, including the features and differences in some the of digital music services mentioned..