“The digital music market has more than tripled in a year, and that has helped offset a continuing decline in sales of CDs and other physical formats,” The Associated Press reports. “Spurred by the iPod revolution, digital music sales totaled $790 million in the first half of this year, equivalent to 6 percent of industry sales, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimated in a report Monday.”
“That compared to $220 million in the same period last year… The digital boom, which now exceeds the value of the global singles market, was largely driven by sales in the top five markets the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany and France, IFPI said in Monday’s report. Sales of physical formats fell 6.3 percent by value in the period to $12.4 billion, it said,” AP reports. “Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes online music store accounts for 82 percent of legal downloads in the United States. The company has sold more than 500 million songs online and about 22 million iPod digital music players.”
Full article here.
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I low eh somush!
Go ahead record execs…. kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. (or any other metaphore you choose to apply)
iTunes music store is selling 1.8M songs per day. That’s 660M songs in a year!
Dont mean to pick nits .. but is it just me… or does every report (we see) about digital music downloads.. always seem to report Apple dominating this market by a different per centage ??
Sometimes we hear “Apple has 75% of all music downloads”
Other times its more like 80% …
this guy sez its at 82% ….
MW “keep” .. as in .. who KEEPs the accurate records ?
75000 song per hour
6250 per minute
and 104 per second
WOW!! Is it an NT serving all those songs?
Dont mean to pick nits .. but is it just me..
It is just you,
It is not a static market. It is directly related to the number of players out there and the influence of the tide in the north sea.
MD=clue as in get a
A little hostile today, alex ?
Yes, its not a static market… but we still see different per centages from different reports..on the same day !
A clue ??
You sure you have one ??
Great article about Bronfman and the record execs who don’t have a clue.
Where is the iPod Killer?
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/Oct05.iPodkiller.html
In the grand scheme of things I’m sure that a 7% difference in reporting of digital music marketshare would fall within a reasonable margin of error for reporting.
mac dood
a little sensitive today?
“but we still see different per centages from different reports..on the same day !
Don’t you work?
And this is precisely why it’s Steve Jobs that holds the hammer here, not the dinosaur record execs…
I pod because I can.
iCan
“Luxury jail for small criminals”
First, remember that 52.7% of statistics are made up…
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Next, whenever you read about percentages, you have to look around for key words. For example, some article may point out that Apple has 75% of the market for music downloads in the US. Another article might point out that Apple has 90% of the market for music download in Denmark. Skip those important parts and you have some confusion.
Also, look for words like “over”, “around”, etc. For example, a reporter may say Apple has “over 80% of the market.” Well, 82% is over 80%. But as we all know from virus reporting, reporters are loathe to give exact numbers because someone might call them on it.
Also, When they talk about “world-wide”, well, everyone has a different opinion of what “the world” is. Did they include Malaysia? And, as we all know, you shouldn’t forget Poland. That’ll skew statistics around a bit as well, though not to a large degree.
Also, you have to consider what stores they’re looking at. Obviously, they checked with Apple, Napster, Real, and Sony. Did they check in with Walmart, BuyMusic.com, MSN and AOL? How about eMusic, LegalSounds.com, Yahoo, MTV, etc. How about country-specific stores, such as DestraMusic, MuleMusic, etc. You start adding those in and the numbers change. No, not dramatically, but it could spell the difference between 82% and 80%.
the iTunes Music Store has around 15% in germany, a distant second to musicload.de. it’s a shame. germany is the 3rd bigest national market in the world. it’s a shame. i am sad. not much iTunes music store here. though i see more and more iPods when i am jogging… i am sad though.
This is why iPod/iTMS does not deal with WMA. If it did, then the music industry could cut off the iTMS and sell through the other WMA on-line retailers, enforcing whatever pricing and DRM policies that appealed to them.
Over time I suspect that the big labels will gradually lose power over the industry as individuals and independent labels take advantage of technology to bypass them completely. The independents could lower prices and still keep a bigger cut due to reductions in distribution costs, etc.
Until the independents grow and/or Apple secures control over a large quantity of intellectual musical property (e.g., buys a big label), you won’t see WMA on iPod or iTMS. It would be suicide for Apple to do so.
Alex, it’s easy to come up with different percentages for Apple’s market share. You can choose to use the percentage of unit song sales, percent of transactions, or percent of revenues, and for each of these you could use U.S. or world sales. You could use quarterly numbers, annual numbers, estimated next-year’s numbers, or somehow estimate what you think the current numbers are.
That doesn’t mean that they’re just pulling the numbers out of their butts. It usually just means that they’re being sloppy about presenting ambiguous data. Probably due to space constraints, not some nefarious disinformation campaign.
Most of them are served from Mac OS X, running on Xserves.
Because most of them are from iTunes, and Xserves is what iTunes–and Apple.com, .Mac, the Apple store, and QuickTime movie trailers–all run on.
The major function of record companies is to bribe radio stations and to steal from artists.
Neither of these activities goes very far with S.J.