The shift to digital music is well underway, but — believe it or not — the total digital music business is still only about 15% of total music sales. Physical recordings accounted for 82% of the $20 billion in total recorded music sales last year. Needless to say, the mix is shifting. Apple announced that it has now sold 5 billion tracks of music.
The good news for consumers is that competition is increasing and we are getting more and more choices. Single track downloads grew 53% last year and Apple is not the only contender. I have been buying music lately from Amazon. Their music is pure MP3 and has no digital rights management. The first time you visit you download a free music player. From then on it is really easy. Yesterday I found some excellent Doo Wop albums. I bought the music with one-click and it was automatically downloaded to iTunes. I then updated the iTunes Doo Wop smartlist. The list automatically updates to a random selection one gigabyte in size which I then copied to an SD card which I then put in the MP3 player on the Trike. The price is 89 cents per track with competitive album pricing. They also have a Special Deals Program.
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