US digital album sales down in 2013

US digital album sales dropped for the first time in 2013 as the overall albums sector declined by 8.4%.

Having hit a record level of 117.68 million units sold the previous year, the market for download albums dropped marginally to 117.58 million last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. This was a fall of around 0.08%.

Despite the decline, digital claimed another new record share of total album sales, accounting for 41% of the market. This compared to 37% in 2012 and 31% in 2011.

Overall album sales across the year fell from 315.96 million units to 289.41 million units with the 8.4% drop worse than the 6.4% fall endured in the UK. Within this, CD sales were down by around 14%, although vinyl had its best numbers in the SoundScan era dating back to 1991 for a sixth successive year with 6.1 million units sold. This represented an increase of around 33% on 2012 with Daft Punk's Random Access Memories the top seller and Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires Of The City and Jack White's Blunderbuss placed second and third.

As in the UK, 2013 marked the first year in the US that singles sales declined in the download era with 1.26 billion tracks purchased. This compared to 1.34 billion in 2012, a 6.0% fall.