It looks like online music, which the industry has fought to the last bullet, might have saved record label's bacon this year.

For 2008, total music sales rose 10 percent to 1.51 billion units sold, up from 1.36 billion units the year before, according to beancounters at Nielsen. However these figures include physical albums, digital albums and tracks, and music videos. On their own digital music was the biggest growth industry. There were 1.07 billion digital tracks sold in 2008, up 27 percent from 2007, and there were 65.8 million digital albums sold, up 32 percent.

Nielsen said that the number of albums sold fell 14 percent to 428 million in the year just ended. CDs sold through e-commerce sites fell 8.6 percent to 27.5 million units from 2007 to 2008. In other words people are downloading their music and they are only interested in singles.

The top-selling digital song for 2008 was "Bleeding Love" from Leona Lewis, with 3.4 million units sold, while Rihanna was the top-selling digital artist, with 9.9 million units sold.