• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, December 15, 2006

Chalk up more research showing strong sales growth at iTunes. comScore Networks Thursday reported that sales at Apple's digital music store year-over-year have grown 84% during the first nine months of this year.

The comScore data comes the same week that Forrester Research ignited a controversy with a report stating that iTunes sales had fallen 65% the first six months of the year.

Apple fired back with a statement denying that sales had slowed, and claiming that iTunes accounts for nearly 6% of all the music sold in the United States, making Apple the fourth-largest music-retailer. Piper Jaffray chimed in with its own research Tuesday, indicating that the number of songs sold per week on iTunes had grown 78% during the first nine months of 2006 compared to the year-earlier period.

In addition to reporting that sales had nearly doubled, comScore also found that the number of unique visitors to the iTunes site reached 20.8 million last month--an 85% increase from last year.

"As Mark Twain might have said, the rumors of iTunes' death have been greatly exaggerated," said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks, in a prepared statement. comScore bases its iTunes sales estimate on its panel of 1.5 million U.S. consumers who allow comScore to capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

Separately, Nielsen SoundScan Thursday also reported that sales of individually downloaded digital tracks were up 67% for the first 49 weeks of this year compared to 2005.

In a blog post Wednesday addressing the iTunes contretemps, Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff blamed news reports for sensationalizing the 65% drop in sales during the first half of 2006. He noted that the sample of 2,700 U.S. credit and debit card transactions on which Forrester based its estimate wasn't large enough to conclude that iTunes sales were "collapsing"--a word used in some headlines about the report.

Rather, he argued that iTunes sales are simply leveling off. "It's the music industry that has to worry, since the $1 billion a year or so from iTunes, globally, doesn't nearly make up for even the drop in CD sales in the US, which are now down $2.5 billion from where they were," he wrote.

ComScore declined to comment on its iTunes data beyond its statement. But the year-over-year figures it provided appeared to be aimed at countering any seasonal sales shifts that might have been reflected in the Forrester data. In the report, Bernoff acknowledged that with only two years of full data it was "too soon to tell if this decline was seasonal or if buyers were reaching their saturation level for digital music."