I just stumbled across some stats that really show how CD sales have tapered off in the last decade or so:

1994: Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album went triple platinum (in excess of 3-million in sales). It reached No. 8 on the Billboard 200.

2006: Petty’s Highway Companion fell short of gold (500,000 in sales) while reaching No. 4 on the Billboard 200.

Both CDs came out when Soundscan technology — which records sales via bar codes — was available. So for the mathematically impaired, this means that Petty’s most recent disc charted four positions higher than his release a dozen years ago, but sold less than one-sixth the units.

Next time you hear about an act entering the Top 5 on the Billboard album sales chart, don’t assume that its moving a lot of copies.

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...