• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, March 22, 2007 11 AM

In the tech circles, bloggers are shouting "hooray" at the news that CD sales for the first three months of the year declined 20 percent from a year earlier. This latest sign indicates that the seismic shift in the way consumers get music is accelerating. Sadly for the music industry, CD sales still represent 85 percent of all sales, despite the decline. According to The Wall Street Journal, music retailers are already going the way of the dinosaur: approximately 800 retail stores closed nationwide last year.

Even worse for music executives is the fact that the rate of decline is faster than the growth of digital downloads, which were supposed to save the music biz. The difference as we all know is being made up by piracy, which can take various forms on the Web. According to BigChampagne LLC, a research firm, more than 1 billion songs were traded on illegal file-sharing networks last year.

Apple, meanwhile, is rolling. It's sale of around 100 million iPods shows that more music is being consumed these days than ever before--but only Apple seems to make money from it.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »