Apple's iTunes Store has climbed to second place among all legal US music stores and is second only to Wal-Mart, according to a new study by The NPD Group. The research firm notes that about 29 million users, or 10 percent of all people acquiring music in the US, turned to paid download services throughout the course of 2007 and more often shopped at iTunes than through any other service. The total figure represented a jump of about five million versus 2006 and saw most sales go to buyers between 36 and 50 years old. This same segment largely drove sales of portable media players like the iPod.
This success, however, comes amidst falling sales among younger buyers. Analysts note that while the amount of music added to listeners' collections climbed by 6 percent in 2007, the overall plunge in CD sales actually dropped the amount of actual spending by 10 percent, with most spending just $40 on legal music for the entire year. As many as one million people stopped buying CDs altogether in the last year, with nearly half of all teenagers -- 48 percent -- never having bought their music in the physical medium.
Not by a long shot can you say Apple's Music Business has been successful. If there are 29M users, and they've sold 100M ipods, it means at the same time that their iPod business is booming (well, duh...) and that their music business sucks, with only one account for every three iPods (what?!). Plus, the amount of music climbed while overall music sales dropped... Let me repeat it again, Apple makes money off of Piracy! Their music business is unsustainable except as a sidekick to the iPod business. On the long run, Apple is not out to help the musicians or even the consumers with better (quality) products (iPods nor music). Their sole objective is to make a shinier gadget to make people throw away their old iPods in favor of new ones.
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