A major tide is shifting in the music industry as the digital age slowly eats away at the number of CD sales in favor of downloadable MP3s. Today, Apple has announced that the sales figures for 2007 are in from the NPD Group, and iTunes has come in as the #2 music retailer, trailing only behind Wal-Mart.

In today's press release, Apple has revealed that more than 50 million people are now using the iTunes store of more than 6 million songs, which has sold more than 4 billion songs to date. Even more impressive are the sales for Christmas Day 2007, which Apple puts at “an incredible 20 million songs.”

“We’d like to thank the over 50 million music lovers who have helped the iTunes Store reach this incredible milestone. We continue to add great new features like iTunes Movie Rentals to give our customers even more reason to love iTunes.” announced Eddy Cue, VP of iTunes.

The latest release of the iTunes software, version 7.6, has now integrated access to the service's newly launched Movie Rentals feature that allows customers to rent movies to be watched on a computer, a current iPod, an iPhone, or even on an HDTV through the use of an Apple TV device. By March, more than 1,000 movie titles should be available, including at least 100 titles in hi-def. Does Apple have it's sight set on NetFlix and Blockbuster next?

It's very impressive to see iTunes so high amongst traditional CD retailers. This goes to show how wrong industry execs were in viewing the digital age as a curse to the music industry that should be avoided. All the outrageous lawsuits against file-sharers and P2P networks still has not prevented the inevitable from happening. The success of the original Napster should have shown the RIAA in advance how customers wanted their music, and labels should have jumped to develop a legal and profitable way to provide it.

Oh well, I guess that's why the deep pockets of Steve Jobs and Apple stepped in and seized an opportunity many other were too blind to see. This is only the beginning of digital music stores rivaling CD retailers. The major success of the completely DRM-free AmazonMP3 marketplace, as well as the Zune marketplace (despite its flawed pricing structure), pretty much shows us that CDs probably won't last much longer.

Now, if only the car audio industry could catch up with the digital age and start providing more logical ways to listen to those digital files in the car, while maintaining quality. FM transmitters sound horrible most of the time, and having to control an iPod as well as the car's stereo can, at times, be too much for someone driving a car at the same time as well. Really, this is the only place I even listen to CDs anymore.