Thursday, August 20, 2009

iTunes Continues to Dominate Digital

A new report from the NPD Group claims that 25% of all music sold in the US is sold through the iTunes Store and paid digital music downloads have continued to grow to 35% from 20% in 2007.

iTunes remains the clear market leader across all music sales, followed Walmart (14%) and then Best Buy came in third. When looking at only online sales, iTunes generated a staggering 69 % of the digital music sales in the 1st half of 2009, followed by Amazon MP3 with just 8%. CDs continue make up 65% of all music sold, with Walmart leading the physical sales market with 20% market share. However, digital music sales are growing at 15 to 20 %, and CDs falling by an equal proportion, forces NPD to predict digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010.

The interesting observation would be the continued power of iTunes in the digital market. It raises the opportunity of Apple becoming the media source store, for not just music, but all digital files, including books.

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