James Delahunty
26 Nov 2004 7:20
As the market emerges for Digital Music Sales and more and more companies open their very own online music stores, the sales being made will take a long time to beat the sales of CDs, DVDs and other media. Informa Media Group estimates by 2010 global online music sales will exceed $6bn which is quite impressive. However, this doesn’t just include digital music downloads, that also includes CDs being sold by Internet retailer giants like Amazon. It is estimated that $3.1bn of the total amount of money will be from digital music sales. This is good news and bad news for companies like Apple who have quite successful download stores.
As the market gets more competitive, we will probably see many of the online stores disappearing due to lack of business. At the moment, most online stores sell tracks for about the same amount, usually 99c a track so there is no competition and downloaders wont be looking around for cheaper alternatives. When you take the $6bn figure, you also have to remember that $6bn is only 15.2 per cent of total spending on music worldwide. Next year sales of digital downloads will total $422.7m, more than double the $179.5m that will be spent this year, IMG reckons. It seems likely that Apple's current lead in the digital music business will fall as more companies open their stores and get competitive. Also it seems likely that Apple's iPod will receive more serious competition within the next few years.
Source:
The Register