Susan Boyle is a Top Seller This Season

Ms. Boyle’s album, “I Dreamed a Dream” (Syco/Columbia), sold 701,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the biggest opening-week sales for any album this year, eclipsing superstars like Eminem and U2, and the best for a debut artist since Snoop Dogg’s “Doggystyle” in 1993.

Only 6 percent of the sales for “I Dreamed a Dream” were digital downloads, far below the industry’s overall ratio of physical to digital sales. As recently as three years ago CDs — which are more profitable for record labels than downloads are — accounted for 94 percent of the market. But by the middle of this year that share had slipped to about 77 percent. The previous week’s No. 1 release, John Mayer’s “Battle Studies” (Columbia), sold a notable 45 percent of its opening-week 286,000 copies digitally.

For many in the music industry Ms. Boyle’s sales are a reminder of a large and often forgotten audience: older listeners who, whether they are less tech-savvy than younger consumers or they simply prefer to hold purchases in their hands, favor CDs over downloads.

“The reason that this record really did what it did,” Steve Barnett, chairman of Columbia Records, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, “was that people wanted to get it and own it, to feel like they’re a part of it.”

At Hastings Entertainment, which operates 154 large music and media stores throughout the United States, “I Dreamed a Dream” was the top seller last week, and Kevin Ball, the company’s vice president for marketing, said he expected the album to remain its No. 1 through the holiday season. “The demo of the customer for this CD in Hastings stores tends to be the adult music lovers who have traditionally purchased their music on CDs,” Mr. Ball said.

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