The Wall Street Journal mentions the music industry is showing signs of renewed strength.

After years of losing buyers, caused by many consumers who simply stopped buying music, the total number of CD buyers increased for the second consecutive year, growing 2% to 78 million [in 2011]

Paid downloads also increased:

Total music-track sales rose 4% last year, the first gain in many years. Paid download buyers increased 14% in 2011, to 45 million customers. Digital buyers also spent more at iTunes Music Store, Amazon AMZN MP3, and other digital music stores in 2011.

People are spending more time with music discovery sites like Pandora and Spotify as well as mobile devices:

It’s so obvious what has happened in the last year or two,” said Russ Crupnick, senior vice president of industry analysis at NPD, in an interview Tuesday. “Consumers have a lot more ways to discover new music than they have had traditionally. Services like Pandora P , Spotify and Rhapsody have made it easier to get a song you like into your head, and consumers are then going to iTunes or a physical store like Target and putting that song or album on their shopping list. With more mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, people are just spending more time with music.

I believe breakout artists such as Adele and Katy Perry have skewed the sales numbers. For the last year, Adele is selling 100,000 copies a week, which isn’t typical for the last 5 to 7 years. Regardless, the 4th quarter will paint a clearer picture.

The quality of pop music been better recently, from Adele to Lady Gaga to Katy Perry to Susan Boyle, and people are responding to that,” Crupnick explained. “And 10 years after the advent of Apple’s AAPL iTunes, far more people buy CDs than downloads.”

Ironically, people are still buying CD’s. It’s been predicted that CD’s would be obsolete by 2012.

In our rapidly changing world, it is perhaps odd to suppose that a physical medium would still resonate with people. However, Crupnick said, there are still plenty of Baby Boomers and other listeners who just enjoy the CD experience in the car, and there remains a core contingent of consumers who find CDs to be the best way to enjoy the album format, which offers an assortment of songs from a favorite artist, tied to a unifying theme.

Piracy is on the decline as well, the UK just singed a bill (ACTA) that makes illegal downloading on par with “Class A drugs, people smuggling and human trafficking, major gun crime, fraud and money laundering.”

One other thing has clearly helped the music industry claw its way back to growth – a decline in piracy. The NPD report also noted a decline in unpaid music acquisition, such as P2P file sharing and trading music on hard drives. NPD estimates that 13% of Internet users downloaded music from a P2P site in 2011, down from a peak of 19% in 2006. In addition to giving customers more legitimate sources to find music, the industry has worked hard to crack down on file sharing sites.

The music industry is still finding it’s place in rapidly changing landscape, but it’s still breathing.