“Despite increasing competition, Apple’s iPod still rules the digital-music world, according to new reports from market researchers,” David Becker reports for CNET News.

“Research company The NPD Group said in a report released Tuesday that various versions of the iPod accounted for 92.1 percent of the market for hard drive-based music players, up from 82.2 percent a year ago. Players from Creative Technology and Digital Networks North America’s Rio were a distant second and third, with 3.7 percent and 3.2 percent of the market, respectively,” Becker reports.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: A few more quarters of this type of performance, folks, and it’ll be game, set, match; Microsoft and all of the WMA-based music stores be damned. And this success could lead to possibilities that most of the tech world still cannot imagine. Think a major Wintel box assembler and Mac OS X don’t mix? Think different. And we’re not necessarily talking Mac OS X on x86, either. You heard it here first.

Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple: in online music ‘there is a lot of customer choice, it’s just that Microsoft doesn’t like the choices customers are making’ – October 12, 2004
iPod success opens door to Mac OS X on Intel – March 04, 2004