Rock Ruled Music In 2008: Biggest Sellers Revealed

Overall album sales on the other hand dropped -8.5% to 535.4 million while digital album sales soared 32% to 65.8 million units sold in 2008. While the digital future keeps growing, old school vinyl is making a major resurgence and jumped 89% last year to 1.88 million LPs sold.

Before we get into the top selling artists etc, an interesting side note: while MTV and their assorted channels, radio, and the labels seem to focus a lot of their energy on rap, R&B and country, it appears that alternative, rock and metal are far more popular with record buyers. Rap took a nose dive of almost 20% in 2008 with sales of 33,410 million units, compare that to the 50,476 million metal albums sold. R&B which dominates Top 40 radio only managed sales of 77,014 million (a drop of almost 20% from 2007). Country music was the worst hit in sales decline, falling 24% in 2008 to end up BEHIND metal in sales at 47,657 million. While all genres saw a drop in sales in 2008, it was the rock related ones that declined the least. Alternative CD sales fell -8.7% with 80,919 million units sold. Rock declined -6.5% with 139,666 units sold (interesting almost twice as much as R&B. MTV pay attention to why your ratings are dropping) and metal saw the smallest decline in sales with only a -4.7% drop in 2008.