The market for music downloads and other digital forms of music has tripled in a year, helping offset a continuing decline in sales of CDs and other physical formats.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimated that digital music sales totaled $790 million in the first half of this year, equivalent to 6 percent of industry sales, compared wth $220 million in the same period a year earlier.
Recorded music sales fell 1.9 percent to a retail value of $13.2 billion in the first half of 2005, compared with $13.4 billion in the same period of 2004.
IFPI said the digital boom, which now exceeds the value of the global singles market, was largely driven by sales in the top five markets -- the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany and France.
Sales of physical formats fell 6.3 percent by value in the period to $12.4 billion, the report said.
That partly reflected pressure on prices: CD sales were down 6.7 percent in value and by 3.4 percent in unit volume. DVD music video sales fell 3.1 percent in value and 1.6 percent in units.
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P-mount plays it safe: Paramount Home Entertainment is the latest company to back the Blu-ray Disc format as the next-generation DVD standard.
Paramount said it will join a growing list of media and technology companies endorsing Blu-ray that includes Sony (SNE), Apple (AAPL), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL).
Paramount will still market all its DVD movies in the competing HD DVD format so consumers can have a choice.
Paramount decided to support the Blu-ray format after an analysis of the cost and copy-protection solutions available. Paramount also said it was attracted by Blu-ray's storage capacity, which is five times that of current DVDs.
Paramount will begin releasing its content in the Blu-ray format in North America, Japan and Europe when the hardware is available to support it.
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Domains in Delhi: The sales of the ".org" domain -- the internet address for most nonprofit organizations -- are growing faster in India than any other major nation.
Although India now accounts for less than 1 percent of the users registered with ".org" worldwide, new Indian users of the domain are growing at a pace matched by few countries.
The number of ".org" domain users in India increased 31 percent in the past nine months from a year ago, compared with 9 percent in China and 5 percent in South Korea. Currently, there are 4 million ".org" users worldwide, 90 percent in the United States and Europe. In India, there are about 34,000.
India is home to one of the world's largest number of nonprofit organizations, which include aid groups, religious trusts, charities and welfare associations, but most have yet to go online.
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PDF, shmee dee eff: Microsoft said that the next version of its Office program will be able to save documents in the PDF format, a popular method of sharing documents between different computers and software programs.
Being able to save Office documents as PDFs was a feature that more than 120,000 users have requested every month.
Portable Document Format, developed by Adobe (ADBE), allows users to save a file and share it with anyone using Adobe's Acrobat Reader software.
Microsoft (MSFT) is gearing up to release the next version of Office, code-named "Office 12," in the second half of 2006, within the same time frame as a major upgrade of its flagship Windows program.
Microsoft said that it developed the "save as PDF" feature in Office 12 using the open, freely available PDF standard published by Adobe. Under the open specifications, Adobe allows other software developers to create PDFs without paying a licensing fee.
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Compiled by Keith Axline. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
