Here's some happy stats for all your record label people, especially American CMU readers. Research firm NPD reckons that 33 million fewer Americans bought a CD in 2009 compared to 2007, while 24 million fewer people bought any recorded music at all. So, that's nice.

These stats were presented by NPD Group's Russ Crupnick at the Digital Music Forum this week. To put them in context, the population of the US is approx 308.7 million.