Susan Boyle, Top Seller, Shakes Up CD Trends

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For most of Susan Boyle’s fans, buying her new album last week meant getting a shrink-wrapped CD, not a download.

Ms. Boyle’s album, “I Dreamed a Dream” (Syco/Columbia), sold 701,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the biggest opening-week sales for any album this year, eclipsing superstars like Eminem and U2, and the best for a debut artist since Snoop Dogg’s “Doggystyle” in 1993.

Only 6 percent of the sales for “I Dreamed a Dream” were digital downloads, far below the industry’s overall ratio of physical to digital sales. As recently as three years ago CDs — which are more profitable for record labels than downloads are — accounted for 94 percent of the market. But by the middle of this year that share had slipped to about 77 percent. The previous week’s No. 1 release, John Mayer’s “Battle Studies” (Columbia), sold a notable 45 percent of its opening-week 286,000 copies digitally.