2012 ushered in a bleak reality on music consumption in the US. We had a couple of big names sell major units, Adele leading the pack (“21″ reached diamond status/10 million records sold). This graph shows sales for the last 5 years, although we are a long way from 2008, the decline was not as bad as projected.

According to Soundscan data, album sales for 2012 are coming in at around 4% below 2011 levels (includes both physical and digital). Downloads rose by about 6%. [AlLindstrom]