Oops, thanks, yes you're right of course - I did actually read it and understand it, I just wrote the wrong word in the crucial place, it should have read:
'70% of music downloads = 28% of total music sales in the US !?'
My point remains though, I think it makes a mockery of the suggestion by many that physical media is already 'dead'. Every time a thread comes up about Blu-ray for instance, people who say they aren't interested in it say 'physical media is dead', but if downloads of relatively smaller music files only account for less than half of all music sales, I think it's fair to say that we are still some years off physical media being 'dead' when it comes to movies.
But those figures are not an equivalent because they constitute different things - one being a subset of the other. Digital downloads are only a subset of music sales as a whole. Remember a critical part of CD sales that nobody really points out is that CD sales are a more entrenched business and are more widely available in brick and mortar as well as online (Amazon and for example sells both digital and physical media). Some business have 3 different systems of distribution (digital, brick and mortar, and online). Simply put, there are more ways to buy CD's than there are online retailers. iTunes for example is really popular, but they only do digital. There just isn't as many music download services out there - much less successful ones. Outside of Amazon and Apple, there really aren't that many successful digital music stores out there.
The fact is digital sales versus non digital just isn't a very comparable market