However you slice it, Apple owns music

If teens are the future, then pretty much all of the technology companies both large and small who make handheld mp3 players, not to mention media download sites, should be looking for other lines of business. For example, when asked about their media player buying intentions, 600 students surveyed recently had only one answer and it wasn’t the Zune.

Quoting Piper Jaffray data and analysis by Gene Munster, Apple Insider reports that of the 92 percent of students who own a media player 86 percent say they own an iPod. Moreover, although media player buying intentions are down somewhat from previous years, of the 600 students surveyed, not a single one said they plan to buy anything other than an iPod.

“Apple is dominant in the market, and the lead appears to be growing as the market nears saturation. Apple’s dominance in the PMP market remains largely unchecked, and it is clear to us that Apple has captured the ‘cool factor’ among high school students across America,” according to Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray (click image to view full size)

Equally telling, of the teens who said they use a legal music download service, 94 percent said they are downloading from iTunes. Of course, for the record labels the overall picture isn’t good as 60 percent of those surveyed, not just the relative few actually paying, say they download music illegally via peer-to-peer networks.

Still, if you are the also ran download services mentioned by Piper Jaffray, Rhapsody or Napster or whatever service Microsoft’s schlepping this week, you have to be thinking about the impossibility of your long term survival let alone short term profits.

So, again, if what teens are telling us today means anything for the future of retail music and media players, some day not long from now there will be Apple and, well, Apple…

What’s your take?

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