The growth in legal online music has never kept up with the decline in CD sales, let alone replaced any meaningful portion of that lost revenue. Now, hope that it could is fading as once robust sales growth has shriveled to the point of near irrelevance.

According to Nielsen SoundScan, by the end of November individual digital song downloads (and complete album sales) have increased just 5 percent. A total of 95 million music songs were sold this year, which is significantly lower than the 277 million sold throughout all of 2009.

Most of the gains came from the sale of digital albums, which were up 12%, while individual tracks were essentially flat. It’s believed that total digital album revenue for 2010, despite 12 percent growth in unit volume, will be flat compared to 2009.

That goes along with music industry news that 47-million fewer CDs sold so far this year than in 2009.