Market research company Forrester released a report yesterday will all sorts of predictions for the European market. Some of them are:

• Digital music will make up 36% of the legal music market's value in 2011. (That figure has got to assume that P2P will not be legaized with some sort of broadband tax, otherwise that number would probably be much higher.)
• The 30% drop in CD and DVD sales will be more than offset by digital downloads.
• The shift to download sales will mean more singles than albums sold. (That's already the case. Right now in the U.S. in a week there are about 30% more single downloads than total albums.)

Flashback: In early 2004, speaking about the U.S. market, Forrester predicted that by 2008 33% of music sales would come from digital downloads. (In 2005, digital accounted for about 6%.)

Here's what Coolfer said in response:

• "Five years is much to optimistic."
• "Retail will fight to the bitter end. Best Buy and other mass merchants have built up a market share that they will not soon give up." And they're doing just that. Best Buy, Circuit City and Target regularly sell CDs for less than iTunes sells digital albums.
• "Analysts--and especially reporters--too easily overlook the power of the older generation's purchasing power." What's happened since then? Starbucks has got in the music business, Ray Charles had a hit and won eight 2005 Grammy awards, and Barry Manilow and Rod Stewart have topped the album chart.

Flashback: In June of 2004 Jupiter's Joe Wilcox predicted digital downloads wouldn't represent 5% of music sales until 2008 (scroll down to bottom of article).

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