Jon Fine, at Business Week Online, has a well-reported backgrounder on some big news:

The signal stat for the music industry right now is not the one you’ve already heard. That one shows total album sales down about 15% this year. (You may recall the music biz was not exactly going gangbusters last year, either. Or the year before.) The signal stat shows country music album sales down almost 30% so far this year.

Fine explores a lot of different explanations, but the drop is a mystery. Country music isn’t going digital, radio’s still going strong, and the fans remain as loyal as ever to … the people they liked last year. There’s no trend: Last year country sales dropped hardly at all.

His conclusion:

It may well end up country fans were only waiting for late-year hits to open their wallets. Or it may end up that country, like other genres that have undergone commercial renaissances, has a bum year and then recovers. But if neither scenario occurs, the outlook for the music industry just got grimmer. If such a thing is still possible.

p.s.: On a web note, is Fine well served by the placement of his photo, which, below one ad and to the right of another, is entirely disconnected from the story? One of the ways sites need to attract and retain readers is by smoothing out story presentation and making the content the attraction. On that page, the actual text on my screen occupies … about one-eighth of the page. I don’t mind the ads; I might all the other Business Week crap that occupies the lion’s share of the layout.