During the holiday week starting on Christmas Day and ending on New Year’s Day a record 20 million songs were downloaded, according to Nielsen SoundScan and E-Commerce Times. This number is more than twice the record amount of 9.5 million songs downloaded the week before.
The year of 2005 was not good to traditional record labels, which saw a 7.2% decline in CD sales as consumers flocked to legalized downloading services such as iTunes, bought a flurry of MP3 players, and received music download gift cards. These digital downloads reached 352 million, which is a 147% increase over the number of songs downloaded in 2004.
Music labels have been arguing that the 99-cent-per-song price at Apple’s iTunes Music Store is too low. Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds to his stance that if the price-per-song was raised, consumers would go back to illegally downloading their music.
The number of songs downloaded illegally dropped 11% between June and October, after file-sharing network Grokster was shutdown by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Estimates indicate that as many as 250 million songs are downloaded illegally each week.
Sources:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/
bntjaBW9G7f7mv/Music-Downloads-Post
-Record-Week.xhtml
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/
topnews/wpn-60-20060110HolidayMusic
DownloadsSetRecords.html
Digg 
