Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

The sales of digital music albums in the U.S. increased by 60 percent in the first half of 2007, to continually confirm the preferred way people want to buy their music.

As usual, everybody reports that it isn't keeping up with the pace of the decline in CD sales. I think this is now a non-story. While short-term it makes a difference, for the music industry, they need to overall forget about that comparison and continually enlarge their digital marketing and presence.

One of the practices by industries that have been disrupted throughout the years is the tempatation to put the majority of their budget into maintaining the status quo and how they've been doing business, rather than to suck it up and take some short-term pain to get their long-term gain. The music industry of course failed to do this in a big way - the reason they're struggling so hard now.

The industry continues to struggle because they keep on ignorantly thinking that CD sales will decline in a managed way, and it just isn't happening. Music CD sales continue to decline at a faster rate than those in the industry expect. That shouldn't continue to be a surprise to them, it's the ultimate state of denial. We can't afford that in business.

The vast majority of the industry should be allocating their resources to the digitial arena. Those that want to buy CDs don't need to be marketed to that much, they already are sold on that means of music delivery. Other than announcing new albums how much more is needed?

Anyway, the 60 percent jump in digital album sales brought the number of units sold to 23.5 million for the first six months.

For digital music sales, Universal Music led the way, accounting for 27 percent of all digital sales, and 31.6 percent of the overall music market.

In what may be good news for Waner Music Group (WMG), they have the second-largest share of digital sales in the U.S. with 23 percent, while being the fourth largest music company in the world. It's potential good news if they can hold this position over the long haul. If they can, they may move up the ladder in overall sales.

This story continually astounds me in the way the music industry continually tries to hold on to a declining market. Historically it's been proven that businesses that put their time and resources into the declining products suffer greatly. The industry has to move out of the short-term mindset and give most of their attention, time and resources to the emerging digital platform. It shouldn't be taking them this long to do it. They'll continue to suffer if they won't take the necessary actions.