Year-End Analysis, Continued: The Final Sales Tallies Are In

Nielsen SoundScan released its full end-of-year sales report today (it adds year-end stats to the report released last week), and both Listen Up and Coolfer have rundowns of the numbers; overall, 588.2 million albums were sold in 2006, down 4.9% from the 2005 total of 618.9 million. (We don’t seem to be on SoundScan’s mailing list yet, so if anyone has a full copy of the report, feel free to pass it along.) Album-wise, 2006 was for the children (or, at least, the tweens): the High School Musical soundtrack remained in the top spot on the end-of-year albums chart, while Hannah Montana, which lodged itself in the top 10 immediately after its release at the end of October, finished the year as the No. 8 album.

THE GOOD: Overall, the number of digital album sales more than doubled, jumping from 16.2 million in 2005 to 32.6 million last year. While that’s a drop in the bucket–it amounts to only about 5.5% of all albums sold–it does show an increase in users’ comfort level with digital music stores. THE BAD: There’s a fair amount of bad news, and most of it has to do with physical media: CDs suffered an 8.2% decline in sales; sales tallies at independent music stores plummeted 18%; Tower Records’ shuttering probably means an even worse fate for CD sales in 2007. THE WHAAAA? Listen Up pointed out what was probably the report’s most head-shaking statistic: Fergie’s supersucky “Fergalicious” set an all-time record for most digital song sales last week, after 295,000 people who apparently don’t own any JJ Fad MP3s bought it. Clearly, we need to take some action, so we’ve posted an MP3 of “Supersonic” below; feel free to pass it along to any errant Fergie-downloaders in your household.

JJ Fad – Supersonic [MP3, link expired] Year-End Music Sales: A Mixed Bag [Listen Up] 2006 In Numbers [Coolfer]