Apple is number one in music sales
Apple Computer, already an industry leader in computers and smartphones, has also built up some solid leads in the music business, with the iTunes store number one and growing every day.
According to the NPD group, Apple is the largest single player in the music sales business, well ahead of its closest competition. The Apple share is 25 percent of all sales, with Wal-Mart in second place with 20 percent, Best Buy in third with 10 percent, and Amazon and target tied for fourth with 6.5 percent each. All of the other players in the music retail business totaled 31 percent.
It is also interesting to note that while Apple sold more music than any other retailer, all of it via downloads, the compact disc is still the media leader. Of all music sold, 65 percent of it was on CD, with the other 35 percent being downloads, according to a Fortune article. Sales of CDs are spread out over a huge number of retailers, though, and Apple truly dominated the download portion of the business. Nor is the CD lead in format sales expected to hold. Russ Crupnick, NPD Vice President of Entertainment Industry Analysis, says in their report, “With digital music sales growing at 15 to 20 percent and CDs falling by an equal proportion, digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010.”
This is almost certainly excellent news for Apple. In the digital download department, Apple is clearly in a solid first place with 69 percent of all download sales. Amazon is a distant second at 8 percent, while all other players have the remaining 23 percent. With CD sales dropping off at a rapid rate and being replaced by digital downloads, Apple stands to be the big winner.
One music industry front-runner not included in the NPD report is music piracy. A recent report from the United Kingdom reports that pirated music would probably account for 18 percent of all music sales, were it to be factored in. That would dilute everyone’s sales and profit figures, or if put another way, makes pirated music a huge player, well ahead of Amazon’s download sales. That tends to put the pirated music problem into better perspective.
Related Posts:
August 20th, 2009
I agree that music piracy is a big problem, but how much does it actually cost the industry? Just because somebody downloads 18 albums a month or something like that doesn’t mean they’ll buy 18 albums a month.
In fact, its much more likely that they’d buy an album very occasionally. They might account for 18% of all music ’sales’ as you put it in your article, but if people were to actually buy INSTEAD of downloading, they would only buy a minute proportion of what they download.
So while I strongly agree that illegal downloading is a problem and people shouldn’t access content for free when its supposed to be paid for, I think the figures on what the industry is losing are very overstated.