p2pnet - rss feed: US album sales up
It looks as if the US music industry isn’t doing quite as badly as it wants people to believe.
"US album sales rose in the past week, boosted by the debut of three major hip hop releases, as the fast-consolidating music industry nears the end of another weak year on a strong note, data showed Wednesday," says Sue Zeidler in a Reuters report here.
In the week ended Nov 16, industry tracker Nielsen Soundscan found that 15.0 million units were sold, up from 13.7 million a year earlier, she says, making the point that topping the charts was the debut of rapper Jay-Z’s ‘Black Album,’ featuring productions by Eminem and others, and selling 463,000 units.
"The album was released two weeks earlier than planned because illegal copies were circulating on the Web," Zeidler quotes its label Island Def Jam (a Vivendi Universal unit) as saying.
One has to wonder if the sales may have been due at least in part to the fact listeners had a chance to preview it, in effect, through the p2p nets.
