“If you pan back and look at how people are getting their music these days you see that the companies fighting for the people who pay for music are battling over an ever-smaller piece of the pie,” Saul Hansell blogs for The New York Times.
“NPD’s annual survey of Internet users, which is some 80 percent of the population these days, found that 10 percent of the music they acquired last year came from paid downloads. That is a big increase from 7 percent in 2006. But since the number of physical CDs they bought plummeted, the overall share of music they paid for fell to 42 percent from 48 percent,” Hansell reports.
“NPD’s data about how well Amazon.com’s five month old digital music store is doing made me wonder about the bigger picture of how Amazon and Apple fit into that overall music market,” Hansell reports. “The music industry has high hopes for Amazon. All four major labels are allowing it to sell their songs as MP3 files, without any protection against illegal copying. Their goal is to win over some people who may have been stealing music and also to create a counterbalance against Apple, which some in the music industry believe has too much power.”
“The NPD data for February show that so far Amazon has had a strong start, although it is still tiny. It now has one tenth the market share of Apple. Since Apple has largely dominated the per-track download sales, that makes Amazon the distant No.2 in the market, said Russ Crupnick, who runs NPD’s music service,” Hansell reports.
More in the full article, including a slide that puts into perspective how people are listening to music these days, here.
5 Day Most Commented