Apple more than doubles iTunes sales, more MP3 players sold than CD players

After all the press reports about the dismal sales increase of digital downloads, the numbers now show the reason. Instead of buying songs, consumers were purchasing iTunes gift cards which they gave as Christmas presents. In 2005 song dowloads increased by 150% with downloads of 352 million over 142 million sold in 2004. Last year a similar pattern emerged with a large increase in downloads in the last week of the year. After this large jump in downloads, weekly downloads increased to levels only 20% below those of the last week. This implies that weekly downloads will increase to 16 million tracks per. This will most likely silence any hopes the music industry had of pressuring Apple and Steve Jobs into allowing variable pricing on the basis that digital music sales might flatten. Interestingly it looks like more iPods are being sold than personal CD players and shelf CD players. This implies that iPods have crossed into the mainstream from initially being a tech gadget.