CD? What’s a CD?

Late last year, 2oceansVibe reported on the top three selling albums of 2011, from Adele, Michael Buble and Lady Gaga respectively. In fact, sales of those albums actually managed to create a tiny growth spurt in a market that has been declining for over a decade.

Now a new trend has emerged that bodes less well for traditional music sales, (that is on various types of disc), because last year digital music sales and downloads edged out physical album sales by a margin for the first time ever, and that in the best year discs have had since 2000. Uh oh, see ya CD’s, it’s been swell…

Nielsen and Billboard rankings for 2011 reveal that digital music accounted for 50,3% of music sales in 2011. Digital sales were up 8,4% from the previous year.

Some more digital music tidbits for you:

• Lady Gaga took the top spot as 2011’s most streamed artist.
• The most streamed song of 2011? Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass,” with 84,9 million audio streams and 71 million video streams.
• Adele’s album 21 was the top selling album both online and physically
• Adele’s single, “Rolling in the Deep,” was the bestselling digital song, with 5,8 million downloads.

So as we all prepare to mothball our CD collections, commentators are pointing at the wide variety of platforms that are able to access and play digital music easily, such as mobile phones and the various iDevices, as the primary vehicle behind the rising evidence that online music is where the future is at.

Says Brian Zisk of the SF Music Summit:

The ability for people to purchase music everywhere has really expanded the digital marketplace,” he says. “They don’t need to go to physical store — anywhere the phone is people are able to purchase music.

[Source: CNN]