Billboard runs its story on the music sales figures for the first half of the year. (The one in the magazine has a lot more depth than the one I found online the other day; I would link to it but it’s too hard to find anything on the magazine’s insane web site.)

Ed Christman tries to find a silver lining in the news; indeed, that’s the hed of the story—”Silver Lining.” He says that if you take all digital sales into account, overall album equivalents declined only by about 4.7 percent over the period.

He compares that to 2007, when the drop, year-to-year over the first six months, was 9.1 percent.  I guess it’s fair to say that the disaster was only as half as bad as last year’s.

But there’s other bad news for the labels as well. The rate of increase in the sales of digital tracks, while still hefty at some 30 percent, is by comparison a lot slower from last year, when it was 48 percent.

Another bad sign: The industry has a classification of “current albums,” basically those released in the last 18 months. Sales of those are down more than 16 percent, Christman says.

What the industry calls “deep catalog” sales, albums three or more years old, fell only 2.3 percent.

Those two figures side by side limn starkly the industry’s problem: A new generation of kids who just don’t buy albums. Indeed, if you look at those two figures, the chances are that “deep deep catalog,” albums five or ten years old say, might not be suffering much of a decline at all. (Catalog sales, like everything else, are down a lot from say 2000; it’s probably more accurate to say that they have finally plateaued.)

And finally, a separate story, by Tom Ferguson and Jenifer Netherby, details a punishing new development on the music DVD front—i.e., DVDs put out by bands. Sales of them are down 18.5 percent. DVD sales overall are flat, which means that fans are losing their interest in hard-copy music DVDs specifically.

File-sharing is of course responsible for a lot of that, but you have to figure You Tube is the silver bullet in this case. A dizzying panorama of video is available on the site for just about any current band you can think of; when everything is right there, why bother with the hard copy?

Here again, though, music industry greed possibly plays a part. I’ve always found them overpriced. It costs relatively little to film a couple of shows for a live DVD; why do they cost more than a feature film?