The bad news for skittish music retailers is that they thought that by now a federal court would have stepped in and shut Napster down, removing its threat to Christmas CD sales once and for all. The good news is that even the cheapest of holiday shoppers isn't likely to download swapped songs onto a burnt CD and then wrap it up as a gift.

In other words, shoppers still need to get their hands on old-fashioned shrink-wrapped CDs, so no doubt they will be flooding stores in coming weeks during the music industry's annual fourth-quarter game of make-or-break.

"Digital downloading will have less of an impact during the months of November and December," notes Joe Pagano, vice president of music and movie buying for the 412-store Best Buy chain.

In any case, to date it's so far, so good. Beginning in late October with the arrival of the latest by rap/rock bandits Limp Bizkit, "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water," retailers have seen a string of blockbuster albums debut big, in the range of 500,000-plus CDs sold in the first week. Limp Bizkit actually came out of the gates with 1.05 million albums sold in seven days, according to industry sales outfit SoundScan, making it the best first-week tally ever for a rock record.

Two weeks later, on Halloween, new releases from Jay-Z (558,000), Outkast (525,000) and U2 (427,000) all roared into stores. "That was our biggest sales day of the year," reports Carl Singmaster, who owns seven Manifest record shops in North and South Carolina. U2's first-week tally actually marked the band's best debut since SoundScan began tabulating sales electronically a decade ago.

R&B crooner R. Kelly then stunned the industry by selling 543,000 CDs the next week, easily the best debut of his career. For the week ending Nov. 12, album sales jumped 9 percent compared to the same week in 1999. For the year, that put sales of albums, which drive the industry, up 6.4 percent compared to 1999.

If Ricky Martin's sophomore release slumped one week later (racking up just half of what his debut did), that was offset by the surprisingly strong showing of soul siren Sade's comeback album (370,000 copies sold), as well as the runaway success of the "Now That's What I Call Music" compilation series, with "Vol. 5" hitting 444,000, a new best for the genre. And then there's the Beatles' latest greatest hits, "1," featuring 27 of the Fab Four's top songs. It's a No. 1 blockbuster, selling 595,000 copies in its first week. More importantly, retailers suggest that, unlike other big name titles whose sales often drop off in week two and three, look for "1" to stay strong as a stocking-stuffing favorite for the next month.

Another bonus: With Thanksgiving falling so early in November this year, and Christmas falling on a Monday, that gives retailers five full weekends of shopping, and one of the longest Thanksgiving-to-Christmas periods possible.

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