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OUCH!

According to the Wall Street Journal,

In a dramatic acceleration of the seven-year sales decline that has battered the music industry, compact-disc sales for the first three months of this year plunged 20% from a year earlier, the latest sign of the seismic shift in the way consumers acquire music.

The sharp slide in sales still represent some 85% of all music sales, an interesting stat considering all the hype iTunes gets. Ask any kid these days to site their favorite CD and they'll give you a perplexed look, like, "Favorite CD? You mean favorite download?"

And what's contributing to this slide?

The slide stems from the confluence of long-simmering factors that are now feeding off each other, including the demise of specialty music retailers like longtime music mecca Tower Records. About 800 music stores, including Tower's 89 locations, closed in 2006 alone.

800 music stores is a large number! Indeed, it's difficult to ascertain whether it's just an industry-wide slump based on a lack of big hits, or just more of the same migration to online purchases (and swapping):

In recent weeks, the music industry has posted some of the weakest sales it has ever recorded. This year has already seen the two lowest-selling No. 1 albums since Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales, was launched in 1991.

One week, "American Idol" runner-up Chris Daughtry's rock band sold just 65,000 copies of its chart-topping album; another week, the "Dreamgirls" movie soundtrack sold a mere 60,000. As recently as 2005, there were many weeks when such tallies wouldn't have been enough to crack the top 30 sellers. In prior years, it wasn't uncommon for a No. 1 record to sell 500,000 or 600,000 copies a week.

And then there's poor Norah Jones:

Norah Jones's "Not Too Late" has sold just shy of 1.1 million copies since it was released six weeks ago. Her previous album, "Feels Like Home," sold more than 2.2. million copies in the same period after its 2004 release.

"Even when you have a good release like Norah Jones, maybe the environment is so bad you can't turn it around," says Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research.

It's just hard to believe that music consumers are less interested in their music. Music is one of the biggest addictions out there and the addict will find the cheapest way of scoring the next fix. They should have interviewed some teenagers for this story to try to figure out where they're getting their music. It's doubtful that they've cooled out their hunger for new music. It's just too big a force to deny.

It hurts that the music industry is so wrapped up in making money and not in putting good content and artists out there. I think they've lost a lot of shallow listeners to whatever the lastest fad may be, but there's still markets out there they have sought after, markets that include people with real jobs who still want hard copies of their music.

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