Matti Robinson
3 Apr 2008 4:51
Last June Apple was the number three music retailer behind dominant brick and mortar retailers Wal-Mart and Best Buy. According to Ars Technica some Apple employees received an email today which included a spreadsheet of NPD Group's latest research of top ten music retailers in the United States. Apple had become the number one music retailer in the US.
The NPD MusicWatch Survey makes it official, the first time in chart's history, Wal-Mart has been surpassed. To make it more revolutionary, it's a retailer that doesn't sell physical copies of music. This definitely proves that music industry is on the verge of change, whether the industry giants want to believe it or not.
The survey's top ten was dominated by Apple's iTunes with 19 percent of the total sales, Wal-Mart with 15 and Best Buy with 13. Amazon hasn't seen growth and has held the fourth place with 6 percent. The bottom six included such retailers as Borders, Circuit City, Barnes & Noble, and at the tenth place Rhapsody with 1 percent.
As a whole the music industry suffered a 10 percent decline in music sales, which can be explained by the decrease in sales of high-margin CDs. Nearly half of the teenagers in the US didn't buy a single CD in 2007, a dramatic increase from the 38 percent in 2006. Unprecedentedly, almost third of the music sold in January was downloaded and if the music industry giants take a couple steps more to support the digital distribution of music, we could even see an increase in sales in 2008.