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     Billboard magazine reports of an R&B sales slide in 2006 that is causing the music business some concern. According to Nielsen SoundScan, R&B and rap suffered the biggest declines in 2006 of all styles of music.

     R&B's sales of 117 million units dropped 18.4% from 2005, while the rap subgenre's 59.5 million scans were down 20.7%. Total U.S. album sales fell 4.9% to 588.2 million units. Retailers and executives point to CD burning as the culprit.

The article pointed out that some merchants believe hip-hop and rap albums' accelerating decline to their increasingly short life span.

"Rap used to be the flavor of the month, and then it became the flavor of the week and then the day, and now it's the flavor of the moment," says Hinsul Lazo, owner of Miami-based H.L. Distributors.

     Retailers point to large second-week declines in new albums. For example, Jay-Z's 2006 "Kingdom Come" album debuted with 680,000 units in its first week and then dropped nearly 80%, to almost 140,000 units.

     "Downloading and Internet file sharing is a problem and the labels are really late in fixing it," Czar Entertainment CEO and manager of the Game Jimmy Rosemond says. "With an artist like Game, his album leaked before it came out, and I had 4 million people downloading it."

     On top of that, an unidentified head honcho of an independent label that issues rap suggests that labels' changing approaches to promoting hip-hop are cutting into sales as well.

"Rap is becoming a very difficult genre to make a profit in because marketing costs have become increasingly expensive," that executive says. "With the shortened life span of rap albums, we now see albums only do three or four times first-week sales during the life of a project, where it used to be five times. That subtle shift can mean all the difference."