According to a NYT article, a year ago, digital sales accounted for 41% of all music sales, and this year it's 46.8%. By the end of the year, digital sales may make up a majority of all music sales, which is quite remarkable...
that it's taken this long.
Unfortunately, the RIAA and the large studios have stood as an obstacle to the digitization of media, first by trying to block the ability of people to rip music, then to add DRM to digital media, and of course attempts to muddle the truth by making wild assertions of billions of losses in sales because of digital piracy (to which the GAO said, the RIAA has no basis for their figures).
It has always been my assertion, that the lower the cost of media, the higher the sales (basic economics) and the greater of a disincentive for people to share digital files via P2P and other methods. The corollary also applies: If you raise prices, sales slow. When eMusic raised their prices, I quit.
These days, I don't like physical media, and I don't like paying (what I consider to be) high prices for media that is less than the highest quality, so I just stream my music from online radio stations listed at Shoutcast. No, I don't directly use Shoutcast as my streaming player; rather, I typically use VLC to stream.
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