Apple last week confirmed that iTunes had outpaced Wal-Mart in January and February as the nation's No. 1 seller of music. The Apple announcement followed an earlier report by NPD Group that compared iTunes music sales with those of major retailers.Pardon the pun but it's not exactly an "Apples to Apples" comparison because stores typically sell albums while iTunes allows users to download one track at a time. To more or less even the score, 12 tracks were considered the same as a single album. It was only a month earlier that Apple passed Best Buy to become the No. 2 music retailer.
What's interesting about iTunes' meteoric rise in popularity is that it is doing very well despite some downsides to the format and the portable devices people typically use to listen to the music. For one thing, most songs purchased on iTunes are saddled with so-called digital rights management that limits what you can do with them, including what devices you can play them on. The CDs that Wal-Mart and other retailers sell don't have DRM, so they can be ripped as MP3s and played on any digital music player.
Source: mercurynews.com via pgaliba
According to the LA Times, NPD Group analyst Russ Crupnick predicted that Apple's music industry power would only continue. "If you look at what is happening to the CD and the growth of the digital side, it's a pattern that is going to hold," he said.The announcement validates an earlier report from Arstechnica which reckoned Apple had earned a 19 per cent share of all US-based retail music sales in January, just good enough to push it past industry leader Wal-Mart, which secured a 15 per cent share for the same period.
An NDP survey that had been released in February had shown that Itunes had muscled its way to the No. 2 spot in 2007, outdoing Best Buy.
Source: theinquirer.net via pgaliba
Tags: apple | itunes | MP3 | Music | portable devices | seller | Tech & Biz | Technology | track | Wal-Mart | While
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