20 mln tracks sold in the last week of 2005
In the week between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports. Before the week ending January 1, 2006, the record for the most downloads sold in seven days was 9.5 mln tracks. Sales of 20 mln songs were almost three times the amount of digital tracks sold in the same seven-day span in 2004.