Is the Music Business getting on it's feet again

Lately the Music industry has been suffering in sales due to peer-to-peer file sharing (illegal downloading), leaking albums, and many other factors. With technology steadily increasing and people finding more ways to leak music or get music for free the music industries sales were dropping drastically. According to money.cnn.com in 1999 the sales at the end of the year were around $14.6 billion now fast forward to 2009 they dropped to $6.3 billion. It also has been reported from the RIAA that from 2004 through 2009 roughly 30 billions songs were illegally downloaded, and only 37 percent of music was paid for. Now even though sales are not doing as well as the did years ago there was a little sign of hope. Since 2004 the overall music sales increased Nielsen SoundScan annual report stated that album sales ended up 1.4% to 330.57 million units from 326.15 million in 2010. Personally I think that the music industry needs to do away with the form of Cd's. Now everyone has gone digital. Most of the time people only like a few songs off the CD and only want to buy that certain song. Now the digital sales of single songs are going up even more by 8.5% to a record 1.27 billion, which is up from 1.17 billion last year. Even though it would be hard the music industry needs to find a way to crack down on how the artist albums are getting leaked. There was a big change on  YouTube last year with copyright infringement. Now if you try to upload a song that you don’t have the rights to it gets taken off to avoid copyright infringement. I feel that there are still true die hard fans out there that will support and buy their favorite artists music. With all the new talent coming into the industry and that little jump of improvement I will be excited to see what the sales be at the start of next year.