NEW YORK: "Konvicted," the new CD from Akon, promised to be one of the year's big sellers when it appeared in record stores last month. Buoyed by two of the hottest singles in the country, Akon, a silky-voiced R B singer, also had the most-viewed page among major-label acts on MySpace.com.
Sure enough, the album opened big, but in a way that reflects the transitional state of the record business. "Konvicted" sold more than 283,000 copies in its first week, enough to reach at No.2 on the Billboard chart.
On top of that, the album's two singles sold more than 244,000 copies combined that week at digital music services like iTunes. And a week later, snippets of the same songs captured two of the top three spots on a new chart tracking sales of ringtones, combining to sell 269,000.
As a recording that has sold modestly, but in an array of forms, Akon's music illustrates the new definition of a hit in pop music: Instead of racking up sales of a half-million CDs or more in the first week, it arrives with solid sales from multiple sources.
And it serves as an example of the business model the retrenching music industry is embracing as sales of the CD, its mainstay product for two decades, slowly decay.
The hope is that the success of Akon and others will put the industry back on track after a slide in overall sales in five of the past six years. But nearing the end of the holiday shopping season, which typically accounts for a third or more of the industry's annual sales, many are not sure whether to be cheered or disenchanted by the new order of business.
With some sales still to be tabulated, album sales are down 4.6 percent this year, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. Sales at digital-music services like iTunes continue to rise, but the pace of the increase has slowed compared with last year.
Still, if every 10 individual tracks sold online are counted as albums, overall recorded music sales are off only by about 0.7 percent this year. While that is a far cry from last year's 4 percent drop, it represents a decline from early summer, when overall sales were running ahead of last year.
All of that indicates how sales of individual song downloads are eroding the underpinnings of the CD and remixing the industry's economics.
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