A Look At Music Sales So Far

At the half-way point in the year, we can look at music sales and wonder where everything is going again. Here are the facts:

• Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience is the years biggest seller, with just over 2 million sales.

• No other album sold more than a million, with Bruno Mars Unorthodox Jukebox at 985,000, Mumford & Sons Babel at 600,000 and Blake Shelton's Based On A True Story at 703,000

• Album sales are down by 5.6% over last year.

This just goes to show that we really do live in a single's world. When the business was at its peak, these would've been poor sales for a week, let alone 6 months. On the singles side:

• Macklemore and Ryan Lewis sold 5.56 million dowloads of "Thrift Shop," which is the fastest selling song for the first 6 months of any calendar year.

• Pink's "Just Give Me A Reason" was second with 3.5 million, Bruno Mars "When I Was Your Man" with 3.4 million, and Rihanna's "Stay" with 3.3 million followed.

• Digital singles are down by 2.3% from last year.

Obviously some big releases by Jay-Z and Kanye West don't figure into the numbers here, so by the end of the year the overall sales performance can look completely different, but so far, sales aren't setting the world on fire.

Could it be the fact that more people are streaming instead of buying? Perhaps the music isn't compelling enough? What do you think?

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