ONLINE MUSIC: ONLINE MUSIC SALES TRIPLED WORLDWIDE IN 2005.

Music fans downloaded 420 million single tracks from the internet last year - twenty times more than two years ago - while the volume of music licensed by record companies doubled to over 2 million songs and 165,000 albums, available from 335 legal platforms. The United States is the leading market with 353 million singles downloaded, ahead of the United Kingdom (26.4 million), Germany (21 million) and France (8 million). In Japan, where 4.3 million tracks were downloaded over the first nine months of 2005, the digital music market is dominated 96% by mobile phones, far ahead of the Internet. The penetration rate for the so-called third generation mobile phones needed to download music and video content is very high in the country, where NTT DoCoMo was the world's first operator to launch 3G services commercially in October 2001. It currently has 20 million 3G subscribers, accounting for 40% of its client base.

"Two years ago, few could have predicted the extraordinary developments we are seeing in the digital music business today. And there will be further significant growth in 2006 as the digital music market continues to take shape", said IFPI Chairman and CEO John Kennedy. He believes digital music sales will account for 25% of record company revenues by 2010.

Growth prospects are still vast with just 6% of Internet users in the United Kingdom and Germany...