2009/1/7 Simon Crees <(Address removed)>:

Personally i am surprised that CD sales of singles are now so low.I
expected maybe 60 to 70 % but 96% effectively means the CD format is
dead now for singles sales. I have not seen any figures for album sales
yes but would suspect the percentage to be significantly lower but in
this rapidly changing media world , anything is possible.

Not too surprised that singles sales are at that level.. However I do think that album sales will hold up for now as it's much cheaper and more effective to buy an album from an online retailer and then rip it at whatever quality you want to your mp3 players. That may change in the future as already prices are coming down for (legally downloaded) songs. Amazon have launched a new service and Apple are reducing the price of their itunes songs. And both have moved away from the ridiculous DRM protection releasing them as either high quality mp3 at 256kbps or AAC at that rate.

Still think that people will buy CDs for a good while because of

1) You get a physical product with sleeve notes, pictures etc
2) You get a backup of the data should your hard drive crash
3) You get the best quality with linear PCM audio which you can rip at whatever rate you want for your music player.
4) You get something that you can play anywhere almost, no matter how luddite the folk you visit!—
Regards,

Geoff