Thumping music sales set industry dancing

LOS ANGELES - Online file-sharing and other digital piracy persist, but a gradual turnaround in US music sales picked up in the first quarter of this year, resulting in the industry's best domestic sales in years.

Overall US sales of CDs, legal downloads and DVDs rose 9.1 per cent in the first three months of the year over the same period last year, says Nielsen SoundScan.

Album sales were up 9.2 per cent.

Sales of CDs, which represent 96 per cent of album sales, rose 10.6 per cent.

For the first time since 2000, two artists, Norah Jones and Usher, managed to sell more than 1 million copies of their albums in a single week.

"We've had a big run so far," said Geoff Mayfield, director of charts and senior analyst for Billboard magazine. "Because we've had three years of erosion, at least for the first eight months of the year, it will be relatively easy for the industry to post increases."

A burgeoning online music market accounted for sales of more than 25 million tracks in the first quarter.

The overall figures are a bolt of encouragement to an industry hit by a three-year sales slump it blames largely on file-sharing.

The downturn prompted a wave of restructuring by record companies and thousands of layoffs.