Woolies stops selling CD singles

Internet downloads are the future

27 May 2008 11:17 GMT / By Katie Scott

One of the UK's biggest retail chains says that the market has fallen out of CD single sales.

Woolworths, which sells a third of all CDs in the UK, has decided to stop selling CD singles.

The retailer admitted falling sales and added its belief that music fans prefer digital online downloads.

This is backed up by nationwide stats - last year, only 8 million CD singles were sold in the UK in 2007 compared with 72.6 million downloads.

The best year for CD single sales was way back in 1999, when 78 million were sold but since then, the increasing popularity of online music stores like iTunes has impacted sales hugely.

In fact, it's been a steady slide for CD singles since downloads overtook CD single sales in 2005.

Woolies will pull its CD singles from August with the exception of one-off releases such as the X-Factor winner, which still sell hundreds of thousands of copies (shame on all of us).

Full tags

Audio, CDs, Woolworths