Digital album sales soar, thanks to Adele, Eminem

Are digital album sales finally taking off?

Just one week after Eminem's Recovery became the first album to sell 1 million digital copies, Adele's 21 has surpassed the milestone and is now the biggest-selling digital album in history.
Digital sales of 21 exceed 1.017 million (out of 2.6 million total), compared with Recovery's 1.005 million (out of 3.9 million).
Overall, almost a third (32%) of the 155.5 million albums sold in the first half of 2011 were digital, according to a midyear report released last week by Nielsen SoundScan. That's up 19% from the same period in 2010, when 27% of 153.9 million album sales were digital.
Adele is helping fuel the rapid growth in digital album sales overall, but "she's not just a digital phenomenon," says Keith Caulfield, Billboard's associate director of charts/retail. "She appeals to older consumers, who will still buy full albums, and to younger people who may just buy a single track."
She also has sold more than 4 million copies of hit single Rolling in the Deep, but "she connects with people in a way where they feel she is a 'full-package artist' and you want to hear everything she sings."
Caulfield says at least two more albums, Lady Gaga's TheFame (976,000) and Mumford & Sons' Sigh No More (890,000), probably will join the 1 million digital sales club by the year's end.
These days, music buyers have ever-increasing options for accessing music, including phones, computers and other electronic devices, as well as cloud and streaming services. Caulfield says the technology is moving at a faster pace than it did in the past, when the move from cassettes to CDs took more than a decade.
"If you ask anyone under the age of 20 how many CDs they have, they might look at you with a blank stare," he says. "This is completely normal and expected. Every day brings a new service or wrinkle to how people get their entertainment or music."
Physical CDs still make up two-thirds of all sales, so it's unlikely they'll disappear anytime soon. But Paul Resnikoff, publisher of Los Angeles-based Digital Music News, says he expects digital album sales to increase for the next three years before flattening out. He says CD sales will continue to decline as consumers get more comfortable with downloading and CDs get increasingly harder to find in stores.
"The reality is that digital formats have shown growth because they started from zero, but they haven't come close to replacing the physical totals of 10 years ago," Resnikoff says. "The problem hasn't been one of appetite. There is more access now than there has ever been in the history of music, but there hasn't been an ability to price that music.
"You can sit in front of YouTube for 12 hours a day and not pay a dime.

Source is http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2011-07-13-eminem-adele-digital-sales_n.htm