The BPI is the British record industry's trade association. Their 2005 sales figures, released today, show a massive increase in the sales of legal music downloads in the UK, as part of what has been one of the British record industry's highest-selling years to date.

The total number of legal music downloads in the UK for 2005 was 26.4 million, an increase of 357.3% from 2004. In the final week of 2005, between Christmas and New Year, music download sales broke the magic million-per-week mark for the first time.

Sales of physical compilation albums are down 15.7% however and the BPI's chairman Peter Jamieson is blaming that squarely on digital music consumers. It seems the mass adoption of CD burners in home computers and the habit of consumers burning their own compilation CDs from their digital music collections is set to be the record industry's new bugbear.