Business Insider's Chart of the Day, 17 February:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-music-industry-sales-2011-2 (http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-music-industry-sales-2011-2)
I found the best comment was from Daring Fireball's John Gruder:
"Looking at the trends back to the 1970s, maybe it's not that the music industry is dying, but that the CD era was an aberration".
Do we know if the classical CD market mirrors this?
There have been people bemoaning the death of the music industry (or classical music, or this, or that) for as many years as I can remember. Remember that the bulk of CD sales are from the rock and pop worlds and many more people now are downloading their music from the internet (poor misguided souls!). In addition, one cannot ignore the live music streaming websites such as Pandora, Last FM and Spotify which will also have an impact on how many CDs are sold.
Many fewer classical music listeners download than in other genres (the loss of sound quality being most apparent in classical music, arguably) and I suspect that figures for classical alone would look rather different.