Even though music download services are on the rise in Europe, according to Jupiter Research CDs will dominate music sales for at least five years to come. In Europe, digital music sales are forecast to rise from €46.3m over the past 12 months to €836m in 2009. This estimate covers downloads and online music subscriptions, but not mobile phone ringtones. However, this is only a small fraction compared to an estimated €10.2m in overall music sales in 2009, also excluding mobile phone ringtones.
Forecasting digital music sales is a very difficult process, for example Forrester Research estimates that digital music sales will account for €3.53bn or 30% of all European sales, however Jupiter strongly disagrees. Jupiter expects CDs including CD players to dwarf MP3 and other digital audio players and claims audio codec and DRM incompatibility across portable audio players will curb sales to some extent over the foreseeable future. GristyMcFisty and cerberus both used our news submit to let us know about the following news:
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Technology consultancy Jupiter Research said in its annual report that in 2009, European music fans will buy 836 million euros ( billion) worth of music in the form of digital downloads and subscriptions to Internet radio services.
The piracy-battered music industry is desperate to see industry-backed download services become a hit with consumers to derail the popularity of free file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and eDonkey. But trying to predict growth in the nascent digital music sector has proved extremely difficult. Last month, Forrester Research published a much more bullish forecast that the Western European digital music market would be worth 3.5 billion euros--or 30 percent of the overall European market--by 2009. Jupiter disagreed. See the full article here. |
It looks like that Apple's iTunes will also be the market leader for the foreseeable future, unless someone else manages to do a very good job at providing an alternative. Over the past few years, there have been a wide range of portable players including handheld video players all aiming to be the next big seller. Yet many of these so called 'iPod killer' products barely even leave the shelves.
Of course, some manufacturers have done fairly bad moves
at limiting the
customer to a proprietary codec, requiring a specific operating system and software or forcing strong anti-piracy measures such as validating each song as it is uploaded. The Windows Media Center based players are just a few examples.
Source: CNET News - The Net
