Canada Goes Digital

01/18/07
. (PR) We just got the Nielsen SoundScan Canada numbers for 2006 and it was an interesting year for our neighbors to the North. Digital sales more than doubled with 14.9 million tracks sold in 06 compared to 6.7 million in 05. That's a jump of 122% Remember these are legal downloads so no lawsuits attached. Overall music sales increased almost 10% in 2006 with 64.1 million units sold (that includes Albums, Singles, Music Video, Digital Tracks). But the numbers get really interesting when you look at genre sales. Only two genres showed in increase in 2006 and it sure wasn't rap. In fact it was classical that saw the biggest jump with 20.6% increase and country with 15.4%. But that still couldn't top alternative that was the king in sales with 9,851,000 units sold, which was a drop from 11,837,000 in 05. Rap saw the biggest nosedive in sales falling 34.7% to 2.4 million units sold in 06. By contrast metal sold more than twice as many units in 2006.

James Blunt had the top selling album, moving 456,281units of his Back to Bedlam/ but the top selling artist honors went to the late great Johnny Cash (maybe he's part of the reason for the country sales jump?), all told Cash had sales of 544,598 in 2006. But what's scary is that the Crazy Frog landed at #4 beating out The Beatles, Dixie Chicks, Nelly Furtado, and Canada's biggest rock export Nickelback who just barely made it into the top 10 with 285,448 units sold at home in 06.

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