Music is moving online
A few days ago the news that Apple had briefly overtaken Wal-Mart to became the number one music seller in the US came out on a number of Apple related weblogs (Ars, AppleInsider).
The AppleInsider post has a table which shows this. It aggregates all music sales, I would have liked to see online and store bought music split up which would have given us a better pictures of what the online sales split is.
But two figures that are really interesting to me.
The first is the percentage of music that is sold online today, 29.1% according to the table. Recently I saw that the music industry is about a $10bn business which means that close to $3bn is being spent on online music. And that is just going to go up.
The other is where Amazon stood in the rankings. Amazon differentiates itself from Apple in two ways, one is that it sells CDs and the other is that their music is all DRM-free (whereas the music on Apple’s iTunes is mostly not DRM-free). I would have expected Amazon to be doing better given the ruckus over DRM. One possible conclusion is that DRM matters less to consumers than convenience (having bought music on both iTunes and Amazon, I find the former to be more convenience than the latter but that is a personal preference).
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Perhaps the age of owning music is being replaced by always available streaming services (free ones).
Comment by noel — April 22, 2008 @ 1:06 am
Which is the way television worked until cable came along.
Comment by François Schiettecatte — April 22, 2008 @ 7:04 am