Album sales plummet to lowest total in decades

Reuters reports:

Bad times just got worse. During the week ended May 30, the U.S. music industry sold a total of 4.98 million albums, according to Nielsen Soundscan.

That figure, which includes new and catalog releases, represents the fewest albums sold in one week since Soundscan began compiling this data in 1994.

By comparison, album sales for the week ended May 31, 2009, totaled 5.76 million. The highest one-week tally recorded during the Soundscan era is 45.4 million albums, in late December 2000.