Streaming services take toll on digital music sales Not even Beyoncé could save digital music sales last year. Long considered the shrunken music industry's best prospect for growth, US digital music sales declined in 2013 for the first time since the launch of Apple's iTunes store in 2003, according to data issued by Nielsen SoundScan and published by Billboard. US digital single track sales dropped 6 per cent in 2013 to 1.26bn units from 1.34bn in 2012. Total digital album sales were about flat year on year, with 118m units sold. The sales decline comes amid the fast growth of streaming music services, such as Spotify, Deezer and Rdio. While full-year streaming data have yet to be released, a midyear report found the total number of audio and video streams surged 24 per cent to 50m streams during the first half of 2013 compared with the same period the year before. Jim Donio, president of the Music Business Association, said that streaming music services are fast reshaping the music business and likely to account for substantial revenue growth in the past year. He cautioned against reading too much into year-end sales data to determine the health of the music industry. "When you talk about sales and revenues and the consumption of music, you have got to get your head around the fact that somebody pays a subscription to a music service and that is a sale," Mr Donio said. That data is extremely important to the overall picture of the relative health of the industry. We're just looking at a snapshot today with year-end sales. Spotify, for instance, charges consumers $10, €10 or £10 per month for unlimited access to its library of more than 20m songs. Artists receive payments "per stream," a model that has proved contentious for some artists. In the US, total album sales declined 8.4 per cent in 2013 to 289.4m units from about 316m in 2012. Despite the shift toward digital, physical album sales, which include CDs, cassettes and vinyl records, still account for about 60 per cent of the market. One industry bright spot was vinyl record sales, which increased 33 per cent in 2013 to 6.1m units sold. The rise of digital streaming music services is forcing a sea change in how the industry is creating, producing, marketing and distributing music. The self-titled album from singer Beyoncé, for instance, became the fastest-selling release in the history of iTunes following its unexpected unveiling in December. The singer and her record label, Sony Music, relied on social media buzz rather than traditional marketing fanfare to drive awareness of the album. The album, which was the eighth best-selling album of 2013 with 1.3m units sold, is the first since 2009 to sell more than 300,000 copies in each of its first three weeks. It ranked as the year's second best-selling digital album, with 972,000 units sold.