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Online music's 2004 totals in

John Borland Staff Writer, CNET News.com
John Borland
covers the intersection of digital entertainment and broadband.
John Borland

The Recording Industry Association of America's year-end music totals are in, along with the group's first full-year count of U.S. digital music sales. The results: about 139,400 digital singles sold, and about 4.5 million digital albums.

Being generous, that's about $184 million a year (at 99 cents per song, and $9.99 per album), or about 1.6 percent of the U.S. music industry's total revenues. Not a lot, but not shabby, either.

Seems that people are buying far more singles than full albums, too. That can't be good news for bands like Radiohead and Metallica, who have been loathe to license their music for per-song distribution.