White Plains, N.Y. - While overall U.S. music unit sales, which includes songs, albums, vinyl, music videos and ringtones, climbed 10.5% to 1.5 billion in 2008, total album sales -- including 10-song digital track groupings -- fell 8.5% to 428.4 million, according to a report from Nielsen SoundScan. Sales of physical albums like CDs fell 20%, to 362.6 million, and are off by 45% since 2000. Meanwhile, digital album sales were up 32% in 2008, to 65.8 million units, and digital track sales grew 27% to reach a record 1.07 billion.

Los Angeles - Nine Inch Nails pulled in a healthy $1.6 million in revenues during the first week after they released their new album "Ghosts I-IV" Radiohead-style. The release resulted in just under 800,000 transactions and is its first offering since the band's major label contract with Interscope expired last October, including a mix of free and paid downloads, regular CDs and various limited edition versions.

New York - Hip-hop artist Kanye West's third album "Graduation" has established a new one-week digital sales record, logging over 132,000 album downloads in the week following its release on Sept. 11. The album broke the previous record of 102,000 first-week digital album sales, set earlier this year by Maroon 5. Kanye's album also debuted at #1 on Billboard's charts, racking up nearly 957,000 physical unit sales.

Bedford, Mass. - Groove Mobile, a provider of mobile music download services, said on Wednesday that it will begin reporting global sales of mobile music downloads to Nielsen SoundScan, which provides data for the Billboard music charts. The data will include weekly music sales from Sprint in the U.S., 3 UK, Bell in Canada and also full track downloads from its recently announced off-portal service with Vodafone UK.

White Plains, N.Y. - Sales of digital music downloads so far in 2006 have grown 67% over last year, to 525 million downloads, already surpassing 2005 totals by over 170 million downloads, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan.