CHARTS 2007: A year of few successes.

Music Week's year-end charts illustrate that the pattern of falling album sales and loss of market share for most majors is one that only a hopeless optimist could ignore

It was telling, perhaps, that the question hanging over the recorded music market at the end of 2007 was not "Was it good or bad?" but rather "Just how bad did it get?"

For only a fool, hopeless optimist or someone who really had not been listening would claim that, in unit sales terms, 2007 has been positive overall for the UK music industry.

And so, inevitably, it has proved. Artist album sales for 2007 were down 14.3% on 2006 at 106.03m units, according to BPI figures - a sobering, if hardly unexpected fall.

This was a far greater drop than in the previous year when artist album sales ended the year down just 1.40% on 2005 levels, although in mitigation both 2005 and 2006 reported especially strong CD sales (2005 was a record year), meaning that 2007 had a lot to live up to - and a greater distance to fall.

Compilation sales, however, ended the year up 0.2% at 30.45m units, leaving the total market (including some download data not otherwise accounted for) down by 10.8%.

The question, then, is what lies behind the poor performance? Clearly the impact of illegal downloading remains critical, as does the world's shaky economic state, while most retailers would agree that the return of aggressive covermounting - with artists giving away entire albums in 2007 - has not exactly helped.