Adele Leads Record Industry Out of Sales Slump

Lauren Dunkoff

Thanks to a surge in record sales in the past seven weeks, overall music sales in the United States has slipped only 1.3 percent from the same period last year, when they declined 6.1 percent. This may not sound very good, but in the ever-slumping music industry, relatively flat sales have become something worth celebrating.

The slowing decline is mainly due to growth in the digital sales market. Sale of digital tracks have increased by 8.6 percent in the first three months of 2011 and digital album sales have gone up by 14.9 percent. Almost half of the sales for the year’s best-selling new release, Adele’s 21, have come from digital album sales. Other discs, such as the Decemberists’ The King Is Dead, Cake’s Showroom of Compassion and Amos Lee’s Mission Bell have all hit Number One on the album charts mainly on the strength of digital sales.