In the us!

• Josh Halliday
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 January 2012 16.17 GMT
• Article history

British acts such as Adele featured prominently in the US best-selling charts. Photograph: Joel Ryan/AP

Ten years after Steve Jobs promised to reinvent the music industry with the iPod, digital downloads have overtaken physical sales of singles and albums for the first time in the US.

Digital downloads accounted for a record 50.3% of all music sales in the US last year, according to an annual report by Nielsen and Billboard, contributing to a rise in total album sales for the first time since 2004.

The report shows digital album sales passed the 100m mark for the first time in 2011, as London-born Adele dominated the US charts. Individual digital track downloads also set a new record, reaching 1.27bn sales last year – an increase of 100m sales compared to 2010.

However, while music fans flocked to the internet in record numbers, the report shows that vinyl also had something of a resurgence. Vinyl album sales topped 3.9m last year, accounting for a tiny 1.2% of all album sales but shattering the previous record of 2.8m LP sales.

Total US digital sales were up 8.4% year on year in 2011, while physical sales fell 5% to 228m.

According to the report, retail giants such as Walmart and Target remained the most popular place for Americans to buy their music in 2011. Online stores including Amazon and Apple's iTunes accounted for 31% of all album sales last year – with the same proportion of album sales from physical "mass merchant" stores, including Walmart.

British acts including Adele, Mumford & Sons, Radiohead and the Beatles featured prominently in the US best-selling charts, according to the report.

Adele became the first artist to claim the top spot for best-selling artist, album and digital song in the same year, thanks to a string of hits from her album, 21.

London-based folk act Mumford & Sons featured in the top 10 selling albums of the year, ahead of Justin Bieber, Jay Z and Kanye West. Radiohead were the top-selling vinyl artist in 2011, shifting 64,000 copies ahead of the Black Keys and Bon Iver. The Beatles' Abbey Road was the best-selling vinyl album of the year, with 41,000 units sold.

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Its over, Records are dead.

Not a big surprise here. Being able to download individual songs you like instead of buying the entire shitty album is a real convenience.

This.

Not only that, but you can also save time and money simply dowloading the music from your home on your own conivnece then having to drive to a retail store and spend 10+ dollars on the actual album.

Would not suprise me at all if digital downloads competly takeover physical disc in the next decade...

What was holding it back in the last, idk 10 years?

But let's not count those sales! Be like VGC! Digital sales don't count! :p

The future is now.

Well NPD is taking their sweet time too.

And Digital Sales don't count, especially when the majority of sales consist of 2 dollar games.

And?  You would think that an industry built on nerds would get their act together and count them.  The music industry is one of the most corrupt industries on earth, living in the past and the slowest to adapt.  I expect nothing less out of them.  I expect more from the video game crowd when it comes to this stuff.  NDP doesn't get a pass either.

But really?  Digital sales don't count?  Even when its a few million copies of Halo Reach?  I'm not asking for all the digital sales of every game, at least just the ones that are ALSO retail.  People say that gaming sales are way down... yet Steam doubled in sales?  Hmmm.... Looks like they aren't going down, as much as they are going to a new format.

Yeah, I'm sure that ever since the second year of the original Napster, digital music downloads have been larger than physical sales :p

If the video game industry want to be taken more seriously by the mainstream like the film industry and their numbers, they gotta play ball like you said.  You'll see a lot more money being thrown around from investors if that were the case to help out with game budgets.  Besides, its a reason to brag too.  They money the video game industry makes already surpasses the film industry, yet gets a LOT less buzz.  If people don't know how much of an impact it's really having, they just stay in the dark.