In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports.
In the process, consumers shattered the tracking firm’s one-week record for download sales. For the year, the digital track sales tally reached 352 million–a 147 percent increase over 2004′s total of 142.6 million.
In comparison to the volume of music that is downloaded through peer-to-peer networks, those numbers may not seem like much. Peer-to-peer monitoring service Big Champagne estimates that at least 250 million tracks are downloaded worldwide each week from file-swapping services.
