Submitted by: kirkland on Thursday December 14th, 2006 at 05:09 PM EST

The imminent demise of iTunes appears to have been somewhat exaggerated.

Reports that iTunes sales plummeted during the first half of 2006, based on a survey from Forrester Research, whipped up the familiar waves of righteous indignation or schadenfreude, depending on one's stance on Apple.

The music industry would certainly like to see better growth from digital music sales, but the Forrester report is based on a small sample size and indicates that it's too early in the digital music era to be drawing conclusions about the habits of online music buyers, said Josh Bernoff, the author of the report, on Wednesday.

However, the next sentence reads, "With only two years of full data, it is too soon to tell if this decline was seasonal or if buyers were reaching their saturation level for digital music." A similar but smaller decline occurred last year from January to June, driven by new iPod owners who filled up their holiday gifts with music in January and bought fewer and fewer songs as the year wore on, Bernoff said.

» Full story @ CNet