Legal Music Sales Reach 6% Of Total, Legal Video Downloads Down To 20%

Global digital music sales almost doubled in 2006 to around $2 billion, or 10 percent of all sales, and is expected to grow to a quarter of all sales, Reuters reports. A report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said that 795 million tracks were bought online legally.

At the same time, you have to compare this figure to the number of illegal downloads. An article last month in USA Today suggests that illegal downloads runs at over a billion tracks a month. That makes the percentage of legal music downloads at about 6% of all downloads.

Meanwhile, the woes that have beset the music industry look like they are taking hold in video. eMarketer reports that four times as many videos are downloaded illegally than legally. Nearly 60% of the video files downloaded from P2P sites are adult film content, 20% are TV show content and 5% mainstream movie content.