But! Here’s a small data point you can add to the “maybe things are getting better, or at least less worse” argument: Nielsen Soundscan says U.S. music sales (by unit) are up 1.6 percent for the year to date. It credits the increase to a boom in digital, which had been flattening out a year ago.

Again, it’s early in the year. And even if sales do end up positive for all of 2011, that’s one year versus more than 10 years of decline. So I’d be hesitant to make too much of any of this.

Still: The numbers do sync up with an earlier report I pointed out last month, which showed sales were down a mere 1.3 percent at the time. They also align with Warner Music Group’s Q1 numbers, which showed growth, too.

I haven’t heard anyone in the music industry explain why they think digital is up dramatically so far this year. Nielsen’s chart below flags the arrival of the Beatles on Apple’s iTunes last fall, but I have a hard time believing the “Love Me Do” bump extended into March and April. Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Here’s the full data dump, for those who care. And please, please, please don’t get excited about the vinyl sales increase–even after a 14.2 percent jump this year, vinyl represents less than 2 percent of sales.

Total Albums w/TEA +1.6%

(Track Equivalent Albums)

Overall Albums -1.5%

Physical Albums -8.3%

Digital Albums +16.8%

Digital Tracks +9.6%

Physical Formats:

CDs -8.8%

Vinyl +37.0%

By Current/Catalog:

Current -7.0%

Catalog +5.4%

My colleagues are lapping the last one up, with good reason: The OK Go are fun to write about, because they make cool videos and because lead singer Damian Kulash is very quotable when he talks about the state of the music business and his band’s relationship with EMI.

For instance, here’s a stinging part of his exit interview with New York Magazine today:

Q: What other problems were you having with EMI?
A: ?The issue is that they just don’t have any money. The reason a band signs with a label is because they can provide start-up capital, and their business model has sort of collapsed. There was lots of little bones of contention, like when there were chances for us to promote things and they just didn’t have the money to do so. It was a lot easier to be generating the budget ourselves or through corporate partners.

EMI has issued a boilerplate quote wishing the band success–it’s going to create its own label–and leaving it at that.

And EMI does have real money problems. In part because everyone who sells music right now has money problems and in part because private equity fund Terra Firma paid too much and took on too much debt when it bought the label three years ago.

But here’s the thing. If EMI’s executives allowed themselves to speak candidly, they would likely point out that while the OK Go made great videos, it didn’t seem to make music that many people wanted to buy.

Soundscan says the band has sold all of 500,000 albums in the U.S., both in physical and digital form, in its three-album tenure at EMI. That’s 488,608, to be exact. Plus another 25,000 single tracks.

That’s not awful. But it’s not the kind of sales that would inspire a big label to spend big money promoting an act. Even when the industry’s business model was still intact.

But the band really does make nice videos that people like watching on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. If it can figure out how to turn these into dollars, it’s all set.

OK Go–This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Increases in digitally downloaded albums and songs were not enough to offset a nearly 20% plunge in CD sales in the U.S., according to year-end figures published Wednesday by the Nielsen Co.’s SoundScan service… U.S. album sales including digital downloads fell 14% for the year, while factoring in individual song downloads, sales were off 8.5%.”

This is either the seventh or eighth year in the last decade where you could have run a similar paragraph, depending on who’s counting. The big picture is that the industry peaked in 2000, when online file-sharing/stealing/swapping/whatever-you-want-to-call-it became mainstream. It has yet to recover.

That recovery is still a long way off. Despite years of talk, the industry is still yoked to the inexorably declining CD business, which makes up the overwhelming majority of its sales and profits. So it’s going to keep declining for quite a while before it bottoms out.

The good news: If you’re only interested in listening to good music, and don’t care about the industry behind it, you have more options than anyone has ever had in the history of man. Enjoy yourself, and have a very merry new year. See you in 2009.

[Image Credit: Backstreet Boys concert photo, which has nothing to do with the clip above, via Anirudh Koul]