http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4150747.stm

Here were the top five selling albums from last year:
1. Usher - Confessions
2. Norah Jones - Feels Like Home
3. Eminem - Encore
4. Kenny Chesney - When the Sun Goes Down
5. Gretchen Wilson - Here for the Party

See! Clamping down on Napster worked!

Wow. Those CDs all suck.

666 million albums sold, eh? I sense a contract with the devil involved in this growth.

agreed, I wouldn't even download them for free

With the exception of Norah Jones, I agree with you.

...I can't think of any other reason.

THAT is the reason why sales weren't as good as they could have been. It's appalling how many horrible albums are in the Top 10.

But that's a good thing. It's only a matter of time before a great band comes in and revolutionizes the industry like Nirvana did in '91. Maybe the next Darkness album will do it.

The Darkness? I think they're done with. Their next album is most definitely survive or gutter.
Most people thought it was cute first time round, but can't stand them now.

I don't think there will be a rock revolution anytime soon to be honest.

Agreed.

Norah Jones... good voice, frightfully dull music. "Come Away With Me" was a decent song, but she doesn't seem to have had much more to say.

I agree these albums aren't even worth paying any attention to, but it's staggering that the reason CD sales were up is because of these Top 10 artists. I read that it's the ONLY reason sales were up. CD sales for other artists were actually lower than previous years. I don't get it.

Napster didn't have anything to do with why CD sales slumped. Sales slumped because music sucked. Apparently there's recently been music released that's actually worth listening to, although I personally can't stand much of it, and that's why sales are back up. All the Napster thing did was show the world that technology had to catch up with the demand of Joe Consumer With Computer.

reason for top 10 garbage and crappy music ... Groupthink. the record companies have brainwashed the consumer.

Just a theory, but country music has been on a big up swing this past year. Could that be contributing to increased sales since rural areas are less likely to have the web and therefore download music?

What Coral said.

I'll add one more reason sales slid and that was DVD. Most people only have so much entertainment income and DVD received a lot bigger chunk of that in 2003.

YES! That is the only reason, in my opinion. For some reason this never comes up in the articles trying to explain why music sales slumped over the last several years. I know that at least 75% of my entertainment spending, which used to go solely to CDs, now goes to DVDs.

DVDs are a huge part. For less than the full price of a cd you can get a movie and usually a ton of extras for hours of entertainment. But with the CD, you get those 2-3 great songs and in a month when the artists 15 minutes are up the songs are tired. A waste of money if you ask me. I probably bought less than 10 new CDs last year.

I say forget about CD's and start downloading concerts for free. There some great concerts at:
http://www.archive.org/audio/etreeli...llection=etree

There are quite a few bands and thousands upon thousands of live concerts.

Also I think that video games are drastically cutting into CD sales. The growth of the video game industry over the last few years has propelled it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

I always say that the problem isn't downloading. The problem (for me at least) is that there's nothing I want to listen to. Think of all the slobs in the past few years that have come and gone. The industry has cranked out so many one hit wonders that I need a score card to keep track of them all. I think this was the first year that I actually purchased CD's (note: I don't download). I purchased three discs this year ; Owsley "The Hard Way", Matthew Sweet "Living Things", and Green Day "American Idiot" . I might have bought another one but I can't seem to remember what it was. But there was a time when I would buy 4 or 5 CD's a month. Now I'm hard pressed to find anything I want to listen to. I'm over 30 years old, I'm not buying a Brittney Spears CD.

I keep saying that if you give me something worth buying at a decent price and I'll gladly buy it.

I've bought 5x more DVD's within the past 5 years than CD's.

And of the CD's i have bought they are pretty much only of artists i previously liked....no *NEW* bands.

Even the "NEW" cd's i have bought are pre-2000 releases from established bands.

My intent isnt to be a music snob, its just i haven't found any groups new post-2000 to be worth plopping down $12 for.

Besides, crappy Nu-Rock stations in the area forced me to seek musical satisfation elsewhere and that came from the classic rock station. Totally opened up a whole new decade of musical goodness up for me. (and beats hearing Chevelle/Hoobostank/whatever 89 times daily)

Last CD i purchased, Queen's Greatest Hits.

Actually I just remembered, the other CD I bought was a replacement copy of Queen's New's Of The World.

What I forgot to say was there was something I learned in Economics 101; if you have a product you want to see you set the price at what you think people are willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it, you either give them something different or you lower the price. Also the market is affected by things like recession, war, drought, shortages and, what the professor called, "changing consumer tastes". I think that consumer tastes have shifted so far away from CD's as entertainment that they aren't going to be coming back anytime soon. Alot of things have changed over the last 5-10 years. Watching movies at home has changed. Playing video games has changed. Listening to music has stayed the same. DVD-Audio and SACD aren't the answers either. Unless you're a serious audiophile, marginally better sound really doesn't make a difference to the average consumer. How would you market something like that to the man on the street? "Well you really don't notice a differnce but if you could you'd see it sounds slightly better".

Couldn't disagree more, The Darkness is one of, if not THE, best band I've heard in over ten years. They were a breath of fresh air after the endless nu-metal/grunge bands on the radio today where the singer is some bad stuck in 1993 Seattle Eddie Vedder wanna-be who stands in one place and mumbles really really slow at his foot about how depressed he his.