Chart Listings: Billboard: Q3 Soundscan report

Taylor Swift’s 1989 remains the year’s top-selling album, with nearly 2.4 million units (including TEA) through the week ending Oct. 1. She also tops the vinyl sales list, with 46,000 units scanned. Ed Sheeran’s x is second with 1.6 million and the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack is third, with 1.3 million. The year’s top-selling track continues to be Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk!” (featuring Bruno Mars) with 5.3 million units, followed by Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” (3.8 million). Individual track sales kept up their steep decline, dropping 10.9 percent to 756.3 million from 848.5 million in the first nine months of 2014. However, digital album sales dipped just 0.3 percent to 77.3 million units.

Alarming: catalog sales are poised to surpass sales of new recordings. At the end of 2004, current album sales made up about 64 percent of the total, while catalog accounted for about 36 percent. The intervening years have seen catalog sales gain steadily — if current album sales keep trending downwards more precipitously than catalog, this could be the first year where catalog albums outsell current.

Meanwhile, streaming numbers have nearly doubled during the past year. In the first nine months of 2015, streams totaled 232 billion versus 118.1 billion in the same period of 2014. SEA — stream-equivalent albums, whereby 1,500 streams equal one album sale — are up 96 percent to 154.6 million units, from 78.8 million in 2014.