This makes a good complement to IFPI's global recorded music data that was just released. Year-to-date market shares came out last week.

The title of the The Hollywood Reporter's article, "Digital Sales Shore Up Ailing Music Biz," makes me wonder how many more CDs would have been bought if there were no a la carte downloads. Regardless, there was another drop in physical sales and it's being made up for -- almost -- by digital sales. The article points out a statistic, track equivalent albums, that Soundscan uses to give people a yardstick with which to compare year-over-year sales as consumers shift from digital from physical. The track equivalent album statistic, which converts every ten individual tracks into an album, decreased through September to 434.9 million from 439.2 million.

Using a metric like track equivalent albums does not, of course, reflect the continued changes in music retail. Tower Records was representative of the shrinking middle class, those music specialists that used to lure customers with their deep inventories. The middle class will continue to shrink -- who's next, Virgin Megastore? -- as niche-focused indies and hit-driven mass merchants fight it out with digital stores.

Here are album shares (with digital) of the four majors and indies:

1. Universal Music Group: 31.4% (28.0%)
2. Sony BMG: 26.7% (22.6%)
3. Warner Music Group: 12.1% (11.6%)
4. EMI: 11.8% (10.7%)
5. All indies: 18.00% (26.9%)