iTunes Dominates Music Sales; Apple Sells One Out Of Every Four Songs Sold In U.S.

MacWorld:

The iTunes Store can claim 25 percent of all music sold in the U.S., according to the NPD Group, up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Walmart is number two with 14 percent, combined with their downloads, sales through their Web site and in their retail stores.

Read the whole story: MacWorld

Comments

[Halfwit]

Never have bought music from Apple.
Never will.

[hill raiser]

the US economy is still a house of cards based on mounting debt. I'm tired of the administration trying to talk up the economy when no one but the very richest will benefit.

hat tip to http://www.iamned.com

[pakaal]

Amazon's MP3s are cheaper, the files are higher quality, and they're not copyright enabled.

The most popular is not always the best.

[crayola 08b]

i just can't imagine where apple would be if Steve Jobs hadn't returned. this decade would have looked a whole lot different. no candy colored computers to finally kill boring beige boxes, no ipod, no itunes, no os x, no switch to intel, no iphone. wow.

[Guy Incognito]

This is no surprise. When the Compact Discs eliminated vinyl LP's and singles, CD singles tried to pick up the pieces...t­hey failed because they were too expensive. Digital downloads may be lower quality, but they are cheaper (no replication costs, no shipping costs) and made for today's digital storage, on computers and portable players.

The single had a large impact on album sales, both with initial tracks and followups. It is now poised to do the same again, potenitally surpassing them, and weed out the 90% filler that people bych and complain about with most of today's modern pop music.

The brick and mortar music store is going to become the loser here. Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Future Shop and other multi-product stores can survive this digital domain for a lot longer.

[Sundialsvc4]

No matter what a CD or a DVD tries to do, it is still "a physical object," which must be manufactured and warehoused and shipped and maybe sold and eventually ground-up if unsold.

Just ask the producers of "Shrek 2," who had to re-state a quarterly profit as a quarterly loss. (Which is NOT something that a publicly traded company ever wants to do!)

Music is software. So are movies. So are games. When distributed by means of the Internet, the "cost of goods sold" is essentially-zero. And that, my good friends and neighbors, is compelling.