To listen to the moaning of music industry executives like Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music or critics like Richard Greenfield, analyst at Pali Research you would have to believe the music business is in a pretty bad way. And the proof’s in the numbers: Nielsen SoundScan retail figures have shown year-on-year sales figures for most weeks through 2007 slipping between 15 to 20 percent.

But eMusic, the digital music retailer which sells music from independent labels with few mainstream chart-toppers, says things are going just fine. eMusic said it had its best ever Christmas period since it was founded four years ago beating its own estimates by a whopping 100 percent to add 50,000 paid subscribers and now has a total of 400,000.

eMusic Chief David Pakman told us that his company, still a distant number 2 to Apple’s iTunes Music Store, has benefited from being a purveyor of the kind of rare and more mature style of music that adults will pay for. According to Pakman even the music industry’s trade body RIAA  has acknowledged that for the first time more people aged over 25 are buying music than people under 25. The younger group were traditionally the drivers of popular music sales but perhaps now believe music should be free.

Pakman says his company is successfully riding the wave of the long tail with many more small hits selling 20,000 to 50,000 copies rather than one or two really big hits selling millions. “I’m sure there’ll be less than five albums that sell 3 million this year.”

(Photo: Reuters / Universal Music CEO Doug Morris)