The web as the killer of the music industry? Even as the medium changes – the music lives on: Digital music enjoys a dream week – Yahoo! News:

There was so much legitimate downloading in the final week of 2005 that it recalled the impossible tallies research firms used in the late 1990s to dazzle venture capitalists and scare the daylights out of major-label executives.

In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports.

In the process, consumers shattered the tracking firm’s one-week record for download sales.

A look inside the numbers shows just how unprecedented a week it was for the download business:

– Before the week ending January 1, 2006, the record for the most downloads sold in seven days was 9.5 million tracks — set just one week earlier.

– Sales of 20 million songs were almost three times the amount of digital tracks sold in the same seven-day span a year ago.

– Fifteen songs on the current Hot Digital Songs chart surpassed the one-week record for sales of a single track.

– Rap group D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” took the top spot with 175,000 tracks sold, more than doubling the mark of 80,500 downloads Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” set the week of September 17.

– Each of the top 11 titles on the Hot Digital Songs chart sold more than 100,000 downloads.

For the year, the digital track sales tally reached 352 million — a 147% increase over 2004’s total of 142.6 million.

In comparison to the volume of music that is downloaded through peer-to-peer networks, those numbers may not seem like much. P2P monitoring service Big Champagne estimates that at least 250 million tracks are downloaded worldwide each week from file-swapping services.

But a dramatic rise in the tide of authorized download sales in recent weeks suggests that changes may be afoot in the consumer’s relationship to digital music.