HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

How couldn’t it be with almost 20M tracks sold? The previous record was 9.5M, and it happened just a week earlier. According to Billboard’s report:

A look inside the numbers shows just how unprecedented a week it was for the download business:

• Before the week ending January 1, 2006, the record for the most downloads sold in seven days was 9.5 million tracks—set just one week earlier.


• Sales of 20 million songs were almost three times the amount of digital tracks sold in the same seven-day span a year ago.


• Fifteen songs on the current Hot Digital Songs chart surpassed the one-week record for sales of a single track.


• Rap group D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” took the top spot with 175,000 tracks sold, more than doubling the mark of 80,500 downloads Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” set the week of September 17.


• Each of the top 11 titles on the Hot Digital Songs chart sold more than 100,000 downloads.

All in all, 352M tracks were sold during 2005—147% up from last year’s 142.6M.

Just for comparison’s sake, “P2P monitoring service Big Champagne estimates that at least 250 million tracks are downloaded worldwide each week from file-swapping services”.