The music sales markets have been infiltrated by online digital downloads, and their terrorist organization iTunes.  That is right iTunes is now THE BIGGEST music retailer there is.

The top music retailers are now as follows:

• iTunes – 19%
• Wal-Mart – 15%
• Best Buy – 13%
• Amazon – 6%
• Target – 5%

[source - data]

I imagine that Amazon will be shooting up soon as well as they have heavily increased their offerings in this area.

So to all the independent musicians out there looking to hawk your warez.  It appears online is the place to be where 30% of all music sold is now a digital download, the growth is in digital downloads.

Overall, paid downloads accounted for almost 30 percent of all music sold in January, a number that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. With the Big Four labels throwing off the DRM shackles and experimenting with new delivery models like Last.fm’s free streaming service, the future looks bright for digital music distribution.

You might ask, well how do they even compare the two, CDs are multiple songs, digital downloads are single songs.  Well, they count 12 tracks as an “album” so 12 digital downloads = 1 album sale.

Check out the full story on arstechnica.

Saw an interesting graph on the growth of iTunes sales. Digital downloads are growing at an immense rate. Maybe you could buy some of mine?

Date	Songs Purchased (millions)	Source
05/15/2003	1	Apple
06/23/2003	5	Apple
09/8/2003	10	Apple
12/15/2003	25	Apple
03/15/2004	50	Apple
07/12/2004	100	CNN
12/16/2004	200	Apple
07/18/2005	500	Apple
02/24/2006	1000	Apple
01/09/2007	2000	Apple

Will they have 4 billion songs to report this year? Digital downloads are just beginning their growth and it seems a good time for artists to go online.

[source]