“Digital music sales in the UK have achieved 50 per cent of the singles market, and 4 per cent of the album market, according to the BPI, but music fans still prefer to buy new music on CD, a report claims,” Macworld UK reports. “The report claims that as few as 20 tracks held on most consumers iPods are purchased from iTunes. That’s actually fairly consistent with Apple’s news last week that its population of around 60 million iPod owners have downloaded 1.5 billion tracks so far – around 25 tracks per iPod.”
Statistics revealed in the survey include:
• 83 per cent of iPod owners do not buy digital music regularly
• 17 per cent of iPod owners buy and download music, usually singles, on a monthly basis
• 5 per cent of iPod music is acquired from online music stores.
Macworld UK reports, “Bad news? None really. The report also confirms that the majority of music fans who own an iPod are now actually more likely to buy music, particularly CDs. (Which they rip for their iPods and keep in all their uncompressed audio glory within their CD collections.) …While the report has been picked up by many online news websites as proof that iPod users ‘shun’ iTunes, the real facts seem to be that music fans who buy an iPod are switched-on to music by their ownership of the product to the extent that their appetite for new sounds climbs.”
Full article here.
Related articles:
Study reports the obvious: most music on iPods not from iTunes Store – September 17, 2006
Real CEO Glaser calls Apple iPod owners thieves – May 11, 2006
Study shows iPod owners significantly less likely to steal music than the average person – January 13, 2006
Microsoft CEO Ballmer: ‘Apple iPod users are music thieves’ – October 04, 2004