Did you ever use a typewriter? A rotary* dial phone? A cassette* tape player? A music CD?

OK, one out of four shows you have a link to the 20th century.

Surprised? Of course you are. The first three items seem remote in our daily life, but the last item, the music CD, still comes out every year. New research, however, shows that a declining* number of teens buy them.

Nearly half of all U.S. teenagers, 48 percent, didn’t buy even one music CD last year. That percentage is a dramatic* increase from 2006, when 38 percent of teens didn’t buy one music CD in the whole year. The reason is very clear: online music downloads* are how most young listeners build music collections.

During the past year, Apple’s iTunes digital music store jumped ahead of Best Buy to become the No. 2 music seller in the United States. So it’s no surprise that CD sales in the United States fell 19 percent in 2007 from the previous year, while sales of digital songs jumped 45 percent.

Rachel Rottman, 14, says she hasn’t bought a CD in a year. The Santa Monica High School freshman says she downloads five or six songs a day, using paid services such as iTunes and social networking site MySpace, where bands post songs for free downloads. Rottman said she had about 2,600 songs stored on her computer.

Before getting a computer in the seventh grade, she always bought CDs. But now it was too much trouble, she said.

“You have to go to the store and then you have to pay — I don’t know how much, US$12, I’m guessing — then you have to put it on your computer,” Rottman said. “When you download it, it’s right there.”

Hunter Conrad, an eighth-grader at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, says she downloads about 80 percent of her music from iTunes, “but when it’s an artist I really like, I’ll buy the original CD.”

Legal downloads benefit recording artists and the music industry, but professionals are hurt when Web sites or individuals let others pick up digital songs and albums they’ve uploaded.

Fans who get music free online are breaking the law. The music industry has sued to stop people from downloading and sharing music without paying. (SD-Agencies)