“Apple Inc. sold a record 21 million iPods for the holiday quarter, which helped boost the company’s revenues by 50% and accounted for sales of $3.43 billion–half of Apple’s total sales for the quarter, the company reported this week,” Emily Burg reports in an updated article for MediaPost’s MarketingDaily.

Burg reports, “Stellar sales have earned the iPod a 72% share of the portable music player market. Microsoft’s Zune, meanwhile, recorded 2.8% of the market for December, and 10.2% of all 30GB hard drive models sold, according to retail research firm NPD Group.”

A note at the bottom of Burg’s article states, “This article was modified after the original publication to correct the market share figures.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Note: It’s good to see Burg’s original article corrected. Note that NPD does not report sales from Apple Retail Stores, the Apple Store online, Wal-Mart, or Amazon, among others. Add those retail outlets’ sales into the mix and one could reasonably assume that Apple’s iPod share is actually quite a bit larger and the Zune’s share quite a bit lower than NPD’s figures of 72% and 2.8% respectively. Due to limited reporting, the actual NPD market share numbers aren’t nearly as important as the trends they show; Apple’s iPod share as measured by NPD is up 36.4% year-over-year.

Related articles:
NPD: Zune sees ‘10.2%’ share of music player market in Dec., no word on post-Xmas returns [UPDATED] – January 19, 2007
NPD: Apple iPod gains market share over holidays, up 36% year-over-year – January 03, 2007