Digital download counts, but downloads of singles (just like in the days of 45s) won’t count for albums. Which is probably what’s killing the album sales. The pop record formula of 3 or 4 good songs and filler doesn’t work well with so many ways to just get the songs you want. Used to be they’d “protect” one or two songs so people had to buy the album, now that’s not possible.
I thought that would be the case; people are only buying the songs they want from an album, not the entire album. The “CD” is going to be obsolete. We are losers in a couple of ways:
1. The CD began the process, but with the death of the CD comes the death of the genre of “album art.” Some of the best pop art of two generations was on album covers.
2. There are many times I’ve bought a CD, and at first blush one or two songs don’t seem that good. But with exposure, over time I realize they are actually good songs.
But probably the main cause of the collapsed market is that they don’t have anything to market. What is passed as “music” these days is all formulaic canned crap that sounds no different than the rest of the formulaic canned crap out there.