Digital Trends

It wasn't a good year for the music industry in dollars and cents, but the rapid growth of legal download services holds promise for the future.

Despite a market for digital music that is finally picking up steam, global music sales suffered a significant overall decline in 2007. According to John Kennedy, chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), sales took a 10 percent dive in 2007 as compared to 2006, a decline the industry still mainly blames on piracy.

In a section of the IFPI’s Digital Music Report 2008, bluntly titled Copyright Theft is Choking the Growth of the Digital Music Business, the industry made it quite clear who they blame for the year’s lackluster numbers. It claims the ratio of illegal tracks downloaded to legal tracks downloaded is still 20 to 1, and that broadband penetration is helping to drive the expansion of illegal peer-to-peer sharing.

The only good news for the industry may be the numbers relating to legal digital music distribution, which actually show signs of life from a sector that has been slow to take off. Digital music sales are up an impressive 40 percent in 2007, to the point where they actually account 30 percent of all music sales in the U.S. As recently as 2003, digital music sales did not even register as a percentage of overall international music sales.