Apple Store“Apple’s iTunes store, which emerged in 2008 as the top U.S. music account for the first time, widened its lead last year over former market leader Walmart,” Ed Christman reports for Billboard.

“According to my analysis of 2009 sales and market share, the top 20 U.S. music accounts accounted for 85% of the total account base. That’s down from 88% in 2008 and runs counter to an almost decade-long consolidation trend under which the top 20 accounts continued to capture an ever larger share of the total market,” Christman reports. “That was due to declining market share among the brick-and-mortar accounts in the top 20. The top 20 merchants selling CDs and other physical formats comprised 49.3% of the account base in 2009, plunging from 57.5% in 2008.”

“Meanwhile, digital accounts in the top 20 made up a combined 35.5% of the total account base, up from 31.6% in 2008,” Christman reports. “That gain of nearly four percentage points came despite a decline in the combined share of mobile service providers, once touted as the recording industry’s next big thing. Collectively, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, AT&T and mobile content provider Zed accounted for 4.9% of the market, down from 6.6% in 2008. That was probably due to the declining number of ringtone downloads, as well as declining ringtone prices.”

Christman reports, “But iTunes more than offset the mobile decline, growing its share of the U.S. account base to 26.7%, up from 21.4% in 2008 and more than double the 12.7% share the company had in 2007… Amazon’s MP3 store captured a 1.3% share in 2009, up from 0.8% in the prior year and good enough to have ranked as the 10th-largest account. But that’s still well short of where major labels had hoped Amazon’s download store would be by now, dimming earlier expectations that it will be able to significantly reduce the labels’ heavy dependence on iTunes for digital sales.

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Brawndo Drinker" for the heads up.]