Someone gave me a $35 Sounds gift voucher for Christmas, so the other day I trekked down to Sounds' flagship store in Queen St - only to find it had disappeared. Walking further, I found another couple of CD stores I was used to seeing were gone too.

With its mash of public and private tertiary institutions, and accompanying detritus of Lucky Marts, battery-farm internet cafes and budget food halls, Auckland's mainstreet must have more young people - of the age who used to buy records - then any stretch in New Zealand.
But the only shop I could find actually pushing CDs was Real Groovy Records - but even that icon has now given its prime retail space to DVD movies and clothes.

The Wall Street Journal reports CD sales fell another 20% in the first three months of 2007 alone. CDs now account for 85% of music sales, by revenue, to downloads' 15% - but download revenue is not growing nearly as fast as real-world sales are plunging, despite there being around 100 million iPod owners now, and 10% growth in the number of tracks commercially downloaded (to 174.3 million downloads versus 82.5 million CDs sold).

Two more signs of the rot:
1) 800 record stores closed in the US during 2006. Queen St aint alone.

2) Americon Idol star Chris Daughtry's rock band shot to number one in the US this year by selling 65,000 copies of their album. Even as recently as 2005, they would have had sell around 500,000 to 600,000 copies to top the charts.

That's a bad thing. Because as much as I've mostly bought downloads lately, I do sometimes want to buy a CD. A downloaded MP3 track sounds pretty thin when you play it over a grown-up hi-fi. We're losing something here.