One factoid making the media rounds is that the new report stated that almost half of U.S. teenagers did not buy a single CD during 2007. For number-crunching readers that means 48 percent of U.S. teens didn’t buy CDs last year, compared with 38 percent in 2006.

But there’s some good news in all the stats NPD spewed forth. The amount of music acquired by consumers rose 6 percent. However, despite an increase in legal downloading, the total numbers didn’t offset the loss of CD sales, resulting in a 10 percent decline. NPD says the overall portion of music acquisition that consumers paid for fell to 42 percent, compared with 48 percent the previous year.

But despite some of the lackluster figures, the same NPD report said 10 percent of all music acquired in the U.S. comes from legal downloads, and that iTunes is now the No. 2 music retailer in the U.S., second only to Wal-Mart.

And legal downloading isn’t just for kids. Nearly 30 million consumers purchased downloads last year, a 5 million increase over 2006, and sales growth was largely driven by consumers age 36 to 50, the same age group responsible for a large amount of personal player sales.

“The continued growth in legal download sites is encouraging, yet the industry struggles to improve the value of each digital customer,” said NPD’s entertainment industry analyst, Russ Crupnick. “With so many baby boomers and gen-Xers entering the market, there are certainly opportunities to sell more digital albums, promote older catalog titles, or create bundles that will raise revenues. In the near term that’s going to be the best means available to narrow the gap on dwindling CD revenues.”