U.S. album sales were down about 7 percent as 2005 drew to a close.

Album sales from January through the week ending Dec. 25 stood at 602.2 million, compared with 650.8 million for the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The top three best-selling albums of 2005 through Dec. 21 were rapper 50 Cent's "The Massacre," which had sold 4.8 million copies, followed by Mariah Carey's "The Emancipation of Mimi" with 4.6 million sold, and Kelly Clarkson's "Breakaway," which sold 3.3 million units, Nielsen SoundScan said.

[ Of course album sales are declining. They've been selling overpriced garbage for years, and now that people have an option, their business model is defunct. ]

Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June.

Sgt Pepper could well end up as the best-selling online track of all time. But its sales figure of just 20,000 online in the two weeks since it has been available contrasts poorly with the admittedly free Beethoven symphonies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/netmusic/story/0,,1533178,00.html

Domestic revenues at movie theaters may fall below $9 billion for the first time since 2001 after averaging $9.3 billion over the last three years.

Factoring in higher admission prices, the number of tickets sold is expected to finish at about 1.4 billion, the lowest since 1997.

Even with the last-minute surge from two other fantasy epics, King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, movie attendance likely will be down 6 per cent or more for the year. That marks the largest drop since admissions fell 12 per cent in 1985.

http://www.screenindia.com/fullstory.php?content_id=11768

[ People are sick of films that do not represent the lifestyle they desire. Most middle-class Americans want films about heroism, courage, honest clean living and hard choices, not lie-back-and-take-it-easy films about pitying drug addicts and AIDS patients ("Rent"), Gay Cowboys ("Brokeback Mountain"), how every white person is racist ("Crash") or how we should pity violent ethnic groups for getting a comeuppance ("Schindler's List"). What about movies for normal, healthy, going-somewhere Americans? ]