Digital Music Will Outsell CDs By End Of Year In United States [Reports Emerge Saying The Year Of The ePublisher Is Not Limited To Books]

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It was already looking steadily clearer that 2011 was going to at least start the year of the epublisher, with hardback books rapidly losing ground to ebooks, and paperbacks likely not far behind. But now…now the game has changed again, as reports emerge saying that, in the United States, digital music will take over the top sales slot from physical media, giving the epublisher one more hit.

The current word says that physical media sales of music are expected to see a 40 percent drop in sales, and just in case percentages mean nothing to you, that drop represents about a cool billion dollars in losses to the music industry. And that’s just this year; word is that it won’t get any better from there.

Naturally, the RIAA continues to beat the “piracy” drum to explain its losses away, apparently quite thoroughly convinced that, if it wasn’t for those darned file sharers, people would continue to pay $10 or more to buy an entire album when all they really wanted was one song.

iTunes does not, apparently, exist in RIAA logic. And that’s probably a much better explanation of what’s going on here than the RIAA would like to believe. It’s not so much that people don’t want to pay for music–though that’s the case for some, and always will be–the point was that people want the music they want, not a whole bunch of extraneous B-sides some second-rate singer dashed off while they were hung over just to fill an album.

But what this does show is that–and this will probably not come as a surprise to many but is a bit of a shocker when you think about it–is that we’re using the internet for a whole lot more than we ever did before. The surprise is not so much that we’re doing it, but that we can do it at all. The internet is still a relatively young invention-in some places there are high school kids who remember life before the internet. And the more things we find to do with it, the more of their real-world equivalents–be they books, newspapers, or yes, albums–will be displaced as a result.

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