Digital music sales continue fast growth in the US, accounting for 18 per cent of the music market there this year, and set to climb to 41 per cent of total sales across the next five years, Forrester Research claims.
The report predicts 55 per cent of US online consumers will pay to download music in 2013. Despite this strong growth, labels must get used to a smaller value music market, say the analysts, overall the US music market will shrink from its current level of $10.2 billion to $9.8 billion in the next five years.
Forrester also found 64 per cent of subscribers to digital music services and 57 per cent of consumers who download music have bought a CD in a store in the past year.
Digital music sales are buoyed by the increased availability of DRM-free tracks in the open MP3 format, the researchers said, noting digital music consumers use digital services for an average 60 per cent of their music spending.
The impact of this was most recently felt at Atlantic Records, where over half of US revenue stems from digital sales, it was revealed last week.
In the wider Warner Music Group, the company saw a 39 per cent increase in digital revenue ($639 million), representing 18 per cent of total revenue, the major label revealed last week.
“I think we’ve figured it out,” Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic Records, told the New York Times. “It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records.”
With Apple holding 70 per cent of the US market, these figures suggest the company now accounts for 12.6 per cent of all US music sales, though this is impossible to fully verify.
The claim should also be tempered by considerations of the contribution of mobile music, ringtone and subscription-based revenues to the overall digital music mix – but given these competing services hold comparatively thin slices of the pie, it’s pretty certain iTunes could account for as much as 10 per cent of music sales in the US.
We’d welcome further statistics from any analysts out there who may take a look at this – contributing to the discussion is what comments are for…
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:20 pm
[...] recent research by Forrester suggests that Apple’s iTunes now contains 12.6% of the overall US music market. Apple already [...]
December 5th, 2008 at 2:39 am
[...] next five years. That means that about 20% of all the music sold in the US is bought digitally. And distorted-loop.com is doing a little reasoning from those numbers — since Apple’s iTunes accounts for 70% of US digital sales, DL has [...]
December 6th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
[...] Forrester Research reported that iTunes commands 12.6% of all music sales in the US which encompasses digital downloads, retail stores and other media outlets. Since digital sales make up 20% of music purchases by consumers, iTunes ranks at a little more than half of that percentage thanks to some calculation from Distorted Loop [...]
December 7th, 2008 at 6:33 am
Wow, thanks for posting this info. I actually kind of thought Itunes would be an even higher percentage of music sales for some reason.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
[...] iTunes takes 12.6% of Music Market [...]
December 25th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Is there any information about this subject in other languages?
February 16th, 2011 at 12:57 am
[...] been watching Apple [AAPL] innovate for 35-years. Most recently we’ve seen it transform the music industry, change the phone industry and reinvent the PC industry with the iPad. This year [...]