I mentioned last week that I'm eagerly awaiting results from sales numbers for e-books around the holidays. Meanwhile, readwrite has a piece up by John Paul Titlow on digital music sales for the last week of December, and it appears they hit it out of the park.

According to data from Nielsen SoundScan, reported in Billboard online, the week ending Dec 30 saw a record number of digital songs sold, about 55,740,000. This is a huge rise on the comparable week of the previous year, which saw 46.4 million songs sold. No doubt many of those songs were given as gifts over Christmas, but some also surely represent purchases by people who wanted digital music and didn't find it in their unwrapped gifts. This past year's rise is also significant in that it's continuing an upward trend from past years. The music sales business was in decline for much of the past decade, and only recently turned things around.

Titlow attempts to look at why digital music is growing, touching on the familiar themes of ease of use. Interestingly, he reports that "Sweden saw a 25% drop in illegal filesharing after the public launch of Spotify." This is more or less the trend I expected we'd see.

What neither Titlow nor Billboard address, though, is what the flow of money back to artists looks like. It's one thing to say that digital music sales are improving recording companies' bottom lines and a wholly other thing to say that digital music sales are helping creative types make a better living.