“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.
I love iTunes, and I despise how the labels give Amazon DRM-free music while withholding it from iTS, but in the end, competition is good.
competion is good…as long as its a level playing field. I just hope these labels could get their heads out of their asses.
It would be a competition if iTunes was able to sell all of its tracks DRM-free.
As is, it’s not a competition. It’s the labels propping up a front with underhanded tactics. And they’re still losing.
@bon,
Me too. The record labels act like a bunch of spoiled bratty kids who are pissed off that they didn’t come up with the idea first. Now that iTunes is popular they are kicking themselves and throwing hissy fits.
Odd – 10 percent of the market in 5 months is pretty good to me. Apple have less in the phone or PC market.
Apple may start losing a lot of market share because they are not allowed to sell DRM-free material from all labels and are charged more.
Then the gov’t or lawyers should step in and stop the collusion to reduce Apple’s performance.
As long as Amazon doesn’t suddenly overtake iTunes, this situation is a good thing. The labels think they’re undermining Apple’s dominance in the digital medium market but they are also undermining their own ability to force DRM down our throats!
Apple sells iPods either way.
maybe more people would buy their music if they offered new music that wasn’t “american idol: craptastic kids mange hits of the past”
ya know, just thinking aloud here.
There are still 2 very important points here –
1. Amazon music plays on iPods
2. Amazon does not make their own player
So it really doesn’t matter how much music they sell. Chances are, most of it will end up on iPods anyway. Win win.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Amazon’s DRM free MP3’s are actually *contributing* to pirate-like behaviour in teens.
If you use iTunes, the songs go right into iTunes and you have to know how to get them out and spend the time to do it. You can buy Amazon MP3’s and they just download onto your desktop. I know *technically* DRM is DRM, but the iTunes eco-system is set up to promote purchasing and de-emphasize the possibilities of stealing.
Just another case of the music and media industries shooting themselves in the feet IMO. Swallow your pride and ask Apple to carry your music again and everyone will be happy.
They scream and scream about piracy. They demand and demand DRM, saying this is the only way to protect their product. They howl that Apple’s 99-cents per song is just not enough. Yet they throw all of that aside to undermine Apple, the company that showed them the way out of the wilderness. The people running record companies are ungrateful, duplicitous and deceitful pricks. Amazon shares no blame in this, and they are doing what they should do. I wish someone would nail them for the collusion to damage Apple that they are perpetrating. If the record companies were able to succeed in knocking Apple out of its position of influence, you can bet that Amazon’s non-DRM, 89-cent downloads would disappear in short order.
Oh, and as of right now, 8 of the top-10 and 16 of the top-25 selling MP3 players on Amazon are iPods.
Suck on that, MAC dorks.
@ Jeremy
Yeah… no. You don’t have to know how to ‘get them out’. You just drag them from the App window to the desktop to copy them like any other app.
Anyone who says that competition between Amazon and Apple is good is a sucker fooled by the Labels. Level the playing field, then you can say competition is good. What Amazon and the Labels are doing is trying to sabotage Apple. Plain and simple.
@ Jubei
Of course they are. But the thing is – it”s not working.
@ChrissyOne,
Apparently Jeremy didn’t know that, and that pretty much proves his point!
Apple claims it runs iTunes at just above break-even, and it does so to fuel iPod sales, from which Apple makes A LOT of money. If that is true, Amazon’s sales of DRM-free music, most of which is headed to iPods, is good thing. What isn’t a good thing is the illegal collusion between the music companies that is keeping DRM-free music off of the iTMS. At some point, I see Apple/Steve doing something about this, especially since Apple is now the largest retailer of music on Planet Earth. Frankly, I’d like to see another “open letter” — but this time, addressed to the stockholders of the colluding music companies, suggesting that their investments are suffering due to the unwillingness of management to negotiate fairly with Apple.
@ Chris
Guess so!
This situation is so whacked out. The labels, in fear of iTunes, sell better tracks to Amazon, so as to create more competition, so they can have more leverage against Apple to force Apple to raise their prices.
On us.
Yeah competition is good, but in the end, this isn’t that great for consumers. It’s all about greed, once again, of the labels.
256 Mhz and no DRM versus 128 Mhz and DRM?
Yes, I made the switch to Amazon.
See. Sarasota is a fine example of the Labels & Amazon shenanigans working perfectly.
DRM or no DRM Apple has the edge. Amazon does not have a setup box like the Apple TV, nor do they have the iPhone or any of the iPods. Sure, you can use Amazon material to interact with these devices to an extent, but people like connivance. For the average user, DRM dose not mean that much, unless they intend to “share” such media. But to me Apple DRM has not been much of a hinderance and this DRM free media is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Where are you going to use this DRM free material from Amazon? Probably in an Apple branded device.
I have a friend that is a such Windows user. He saw my iPod like 2 years ago and dismissed it as an expensive MP3 player. His daughter got one of the new Nanos let last year, and this sparked his interest. A couple of weeks ago he calls me on the Phone trying to learn as much about iTunes as he him self had bought an 80 GB iPod Classic. Now he is a fan. The funny part is that he never asked about Amazon and I would think that a lot of other people are just like him. The Amazon/iPod connection is not very prevalent as far as mind share goes. So I don’t think Apple has much to worry unless this somehow changes.
I think we should deport all Shenanigans back to Ireland and hire more Mexicans.
For get Apple and Amazon. Im still buying CDs from Half.com. You can find just about any album you want for less than $10. (Prices start high, but fall quickly after a few months. This is much cheaper than Apple or Amazon MP3. And I personally like buying albums. Some of my favorite songs are songs that I hadn’t ever heard before buying the Album.
Note: Shenanigans requires you to have at least 15 pieces of flair.