The Numbers Game -- Albums

January 23, 2010 -- Album sales have now rolled back to pre-1982 levels. While digital album sales are beginning to climb, it is not enough to offset the decline in physical sales, which are falling about 5-10 times as fast as digital sales are rising.

The chart above reflects all of the different formats that have been broken out by the RIAA in the past. The data that Nielsen provides shows total album sales, digital album sales, maybe CDs sold and vinyl, because they're still pretending there's something happening there. The chart below shows the limited data set we have available going forward. In the process of collecting that data, I also ran a chart on just physical CDs. Between 2000 and 2006, it would appear that almost 1 billion CDs were shipped out by the RIAA that were never sold or returned (the RIAA numbers take returns into account). I'd bet a lot of them "shipped gold" -- to a parking lot in North Dakota.     Note: Data shown at left is included in the "Shipments ­ RIAA" total above. With two existing formats and two more introduced during the 2000-2009 decade, customers made it clear that DVD video was the only one that interested them.