“Microsoft Corp.’s Zune took the No. 2 position in the market for digital music players during its first week on sale, passing SanDisk Corp., a market researcher said,” Jennifer Sondag reports for Bloomberg.
Sondag reports, “Zune had a 9 percent share of the U.S. market in the week ended Nov. 18, Port Washington, New York-based NPD Group said in an e-mailed statement today. Apple Computer Inc. had a 63 percent share, when measured by units sold.”
Full article here.
“Another research agency, Current Analysis, reported a somewhat similar sales reading during the same week. For the same week ending November 18, 2006, the Zune took 7 percent of the MP3 player market, falling behind both Apple and Sandisk,” David Ellis reports for CNNMoney
“While the two reports look strictly at sales at major U.S. electronics retailers, online sales of the Zune appear not to be as favorable,” Ellis reports. “As of midday Wednesday, Zune ranked as the 18th most popular MP3 players sold at Amazon.com (down $0.81 to $40.11, Charts), behind most models of the iPod.”
Full article here.
“NPD said the weekly sales numbers come from a subset of the retailers who participate in its monthly report, but that they still reflect a good snapshot of the market. One interesting point from the NPD news release: Zune sales were still less than the combined sales of PlaysForSure devices,” Todd Bishop reports for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Full article here.
[UPDATE: 2:22pm EST: Added quotes from and link to CNNMoney article. 2:27pm EST: Added quotes from and link to Seattle PI article]
First week sales – ahead of the reviews, naturally – seem good, huh? Just like a highly-hyped movie that’s made intentionally unavailable to critics for prerelease review screenings, the first week box office is usually good. Well, folks, now the reviews are in. So, what was Zune’s market share for its second week on sale? What will they be for the third week? That’s the real story, besides how many units were returned, of course. Logic suggests that week one was Zune’s high point; it’s all downhill from here. We’d also like to know NPD’s exact methodology for arriving at the numbers quoted by Bloomberg. 9% of which market exactly? Hard drive-based DMPs, the whole DMP market, including flash-based, what? Need more input, Stephanie.
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Zune Tang is merely zuning out on his fabulous collection of Zune Tunes!
yeah, who wouldda thouht clinton could get elected twice?
how many were “sold” to Ellen Degeneres and other people to give away for free?
American Express is selling them at a loss for a christmas sale.
I would love to see their methodology. In this area, all the media outlets compared the Zune to the iPod and they all ended up saying get an iPod. Every retailer that sold an iPod was out of them whilst the Zune sat on the shelf with no one even interested. Even the Creative and SanDisk players got more love than a Zune. Heck, even some of my tech-able friends didn’t even know what a Zune was. This report is highly suspicious. They must’ve sampled the Best Buy next to Microsoft’s headquarters.
Poets in the audience might be interested to know that Zune rhymes with only 18 words, while Zone rhymes with 26, including: blown, bone, clone, drone, groan, moan, prone and stone.
All those purchases were probably those morons who are anti-iPod because they want to be different from everyone else. Since those numbers are few (in an intelligent country like Canada…lol), I expect those sales number to sink faster than the Titanic.
Oh and by the way, Zune Tang, aren’t you ever going to shut the fsck up or at least change the damn record…you are getting as tiresome as a boil on my ass.
Who the hell is Stephanie?
Not only is that an unrealistic number (as pointed out that is the number shipped, not sold), I hope that they keep track of all the returns after Christmas.
All of those people who received a Zune for Christmas will take it back for an iPod next year. So will we get the January numbers in February for the Zune? I estimate their market share to be -9%
Just played with a Zune for a few min at compusa. You know what? The GUI actually isn’t dreadful. Nice zooming effects, easy to see, ability to jump from playlist to current song and back. Pretty snazzy. Makes the ipods gui seem a little dated. Now all the gee-whizz of the gui is useless for actually using the thing. But apple could step things up a notch. Lets face it the ipod GUI is fairly old.
If I even gave half a crap about watching video on anything smaller than a laptop then it’s got a nice screen. Rotating it sideways was annoying, but could see how it would be slightly better than an ipod for watching a show on. That is if it wasn’t an effing giant brick.
The size of the thing is embarrassing compared to the ipod that was sitting right next to it. The fake scroll wheel would have been better if they would have just had some raised dots on it. And the body/texture of it was just as lame compared to the iPod. Give me sexy or functional… Or better yet both. The Zune has neither.
There’s NO WAY they’ll sell one of those for every iPod. And that one will get returned when the buyer realizes that they have to rebuy/rip all their songs.
Not a chance.
Thumper,
Ally Sheedy.
“indicate, roughly of course, that iPods outsell Zunes 12 to 1.”
Mike, you are being very very kind to MS. Now, if we put exponential decay curve (which I believe is closer to reality), then ratio will become
Using p=0.5 ^ rank & Top 25 MP3 players
Apple 93.3426%
SanDisk 6.6440%
Creative .0123%
MS .0008%
Others .0004%
Using p=(0.94375 ^ rank)/12.83175
Apple 63% (constant adjusted for 63%)
SanDisk 19.4%
Creative 10%
MS 2.9%
Others 4.6%
Even if I adjust the curve to get iPod marketshare of 63%, iPod is outselling Zune by 21 to 1
Hey me,
You got that wrong about Clinton, he never got 50% of the vote.
I was at Circuit City, Best Buy, and Target in the last week and I did see a single person playing with the Zune. I think his name was Allen.
9% share of units sold that week, does not equal 9% market share.
If the US had say 20,000,000 mp3 devices sold over the last 5 years still in operation, this means that Microsoft would have sold 1.8 million in the first week. I don’t think so!
If apple is on course to sell 15M ipods (globally) this quarter (13 weeks of sales), that’s 1.15M ipods per week. Assuming this counts for 65% of the market, the market size is 1.77M units per week. Microsoft are claiming 9% of this market, at best for a single week – thats 160,000 units in one week.
I suspect these figures are units shipped, otherwise Microsoft will need to claim that it has sold 1 million zunes in the run up to Christmas (6 weeks of sales). Of course this figure does not take into account the US only marketing of Zune, so this figure should really be about 600,000.
Magic word: “Less”. I certainly think Microsoft has “less” market share than this article suggests.
Yeah, I just can’t get over the fact that FDR was elected, what, four times? You can spot a leftist in the crowd before you even get to the crowd. He will be the one loudly touting his own intelligence and demeaning the intelligence of any elected leader with which he disagrees. He performs like a circus monkey, doing the same one-trick argument over and over again, because it’s all he knows. Bush dumb; me good! If you’re lucky you’ll get to see him beat his chest in futile rage.
Thumper F.Y.I.
*Short Circuit (1986)*
“Stephanie Speck” = Ally Sheedy
‘s’, I like your math. However, it will probably be easier to just see what the numbers are like in a few weeks.
The more surprising thing is how few people actually bought the Zune during its first week. Often times early adapters propel a product to #1 for that week. If MS could only get 9% during its first week of launch, it is in BIG TROUBLE.
I just spent a few hours in B&H Photo in NYC. They move a huge amount of product. They have the Ipods in a glass case at a special counter. Now the Zunes (all three colors) are in the case alongside them. I saw more than a dozen Ipods sell, but no Zunes.
Three guys shopping at the counter couldn’t stop laughing at the Zune box … microsoft trying so hard to be “cool”.
zune is crackalackin
Even if Steve Ballmer decided to lay $1,000,000 of his own cash on Zunes, it would only be 4,000 of them.
Who cares. More wasted bandwitdth from ZuneDailyNews!
Agree with Dr Mcr. 9% of weekly sales does not equal market share.
That being said, I wonder if Zune’s quality control and reliability are better than the iPods.
m
“Considering that 50% of eligible voters picked a moron for president (twice!), I’d say that the good citizens of the US of A have much better taste in music players than they do in presidents.”
Considering the other options were Al Gore, and John F Kerry, I don’t think the choice was that bad. The viscious media keeps anyone of any great quality from running for president, anyway. I think we’re permanantly stuck with Mediocrity. Reagan was probly the only exception to this, and I don’t expect to see another one like him in my lifetime, sadly.
I don”t know where you guys are getting #18 for the Zune on Amazon, it is number #61 for the black and the other colors don’t even show up in the top 100. It has been that way for more than a week, it was only in the top 20 for the first 2 weeks. Not only that, but the have actually reduced the price by $10 and that hasn’t helped the sales of it much.
I can’t believe the number of bloggers who are paid by Microsoft to come here and post good things about Zune and run down the iPod on this site.
Note to bloggers paid by Microsoft. MDN is for Mac users. No true Mac user will ever be able to use any Zune product on his computer. First of all, none of us use IE, let alone Windows.
YOU ARE WASTING MICROSOFT’S MONEY POSTING HERE.
STFU and go away.
Ruben…Your figures are from the “electronics” category, which is a superset of the “mp3 player” category.
s…Nice analysis. I agree with you and was indeed bending over backward in favor of Zune just to show that even the most naive analysis should produce a figure quite different from the one reported.
I think this is a bunch of BS and Zune will need more than what it has to make it to 9% steady position. However, Apple should as always respect the competition and make sure that they stay on top with better product as they always tried.