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All told, the sales picture in the report is bleak: “The 20/20 Experience” was the only album to sell more than 2 million copies last year, and it is only the second album since 1991 to top the year-end chart with fewer than 3 million sales. The previous low-selling No. 1, and the other to reach the top rung after selling fewer than 3 million,  was Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal Motown), which sold 2.87 million in 2008.

Moreover, album sales overall dropped 8 percent in 2013, to 289.4 million from almost 316 million in 2012. Sales of CDs dropped 14 percent over the year, and even digital download sales dropped slightly, to 117.58 million from 117.68 million. The drop in downloads was the first since Nielsen began tracking them in 2003. About 41 percent of all album sales were downloads, up from 37 percent in 2012. And vinyl remains a growth industry: Nielsen SoundScan reported 6.1 million sales of vinyl LPs, up 33 percent since 2012.

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– http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/justin-timberlake-album-was-the-top-seller-in-a-diminished-market/?ref=todayspaper