The Industrial Federation Of The Phonographic Industry has published a report saying that overall sales are slipping by around 5% per year.

This is in part because while digital sales growth is along predicted lines, the drop in physical sales has blindsided everyone with a decline even worse than expected. In the USA, physical sales are down 7.3%, and here in the UK they're not much better - down 6.7%.

Of course, online file-sharing and piracy took their fair share of blame in the report as well - after all, why break that trend? Revenues from mobile services and performance royalties were up though, so there is some hope for those record companies and their outdated business models, provided they stop pretending the last decade of digital expansion is just a bad dream and rebuild their entire way of operating from the ground up.