Contrary to what Steve Jobs says, that the digital download will replace the CD, Jupiter research has done a study that finds his prediction of their demise to be a bit premature. However, having said that, the digital download business is booming. Sales figures have doubled over the last year, which is no surprise as they just got off the ground. But would you believe a prediction of 1.7 billion dollars in sold downloads by 2009?
Jupiter also feels that the trend will be for people to switch over to a subscription type service as well, but they think we will use these methods of obtaining music as more of a sampling type device to help us choose which CD's to buy. Another area of extreme growth is the MP3 players that are bought to store the music on.
| Meanwhile, U.S. shipments of MP3 players will grow over 50% in 2004 to well over 5 million, and will continue to grow almost 50% per year for the next several years. "A lot of the action in hard drive-based devices will be at the low end in terms of price and capacity that will help drive the market," stated JupiterResearch VP and Research Director Michael Gartenberg.
"JupiterResearch surveys show that 77% of consumers who would purchase a portable music player would want no more than 1,000 songs on a player at any given time, regardless of the size of their music collection," added Gartenberg. |
Maybe I am in the minority. But, when I first got my 20 gigabyte MP3 player, I was carefully choosing what to take off my albums and put on the player. Then, I saw that at 192KBPS, I could hold all I wanted and still have gigs of room left. Probably, there are 1800 to 2000 tracks stored, as I now encode the entire album, then just file it under the group or artists name as a folder. That way, I can use an application like Winamp to create playlists. Then, I transfer the custom lists to my player to manage the music I want to hear.
Source: Music Industry News
