wax&wires

iTunes Crushes Music Downloads, But CDs Still Reign

NPD just released a new study showing that iTunes now accounts for 25% of TOTAL music sold (downloads and CDs), and dominates the download front with a whopping 69% of the music download marketshare. WalMart is holding down second place with 14% of total music sales and Best Buy is bringing home the bronze.

This is in large part due to the fact that there are only a few select players in the digital download world (Amazon holding an 8% share, iTunes with it’s 69%, etc.), where as physical sales have a lot more fighters in the ring. Nonetheless, with NO physical sales (many companies like WalMart and Amazon have both digital downloads and physical sales), Apple is now the single largest music retailer. That’s crazy! 1 in 4 songs purchased today are purchased on iTunes!

You might be surprised to find that CDs still comprise 65% of all music sales; I’m not. I was an admittedly slow adopter of digital downloads, at least when compared to my haste in adopting other technologies. I think it was because I liked the album experience. I liked the higher audio quality. I liked going to the record store on Tuesdays, smelling the “new album” smell the first time you cracked the case open, reading the lyrics and viewing the artwork as the album got broken in on my stereo. I’ll talk a bit about that in WWTV 005. Apple is currently trying to figure out a way to bring back some of that nostalgia with Cocktail, which they should be all set to announce in a few weeks now.

Don’t abandon the CD just yet, it’s still the primary means of music consumption and you need to have your music available in the format people want it in.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 4:18 pm. It is filed under wax and tagged with album sales, cd, downloads, itunes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.