We often hear about how popular iTunes is and how the music store leads the online music market (88% going by this report), yet a study carried out by Jupiter Research finds that despite how successful iTunes has been, only a small minority of iPod owners actually buy music from Apple's iTunes store. In fact, despite the enormous song capacity on most iPod models, there is only 20 iTunes songs held on an iPod on average and only 5% of music held on the average iPod has actually been purchased online.
Unfortunately for the music industry, it turns out that most iPod owners fill their players with music ripped from CDs and music unofficially obtained for free from file sharing services. According to the report, only 17% of iPod owners purchase at least one track per month from iTunes.
The report also warns against the way the music industry divides portable MP3/media player owners into two groups where one group consists of pirates and the other consists of online buyers, since those who decide to purchase music do not automatically stop their file sharing habits. Finally, the report also mentions how important the term 'free' is, despite how the music industry does not want to see any of their music looking like it has no value, since the likes of Spiral Frog shows an example of how music can legally be offered for free, just by totally relying on ads to cover costs. Thanks to GristyMcFisty for letting us know about this news:
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The Jupiter Research report says that, on average, only 20 of the tracks on an iPod will be from the iTunes shop. Far more important to iPod owners, said the study, was free music ripped from CDs someone already owned or acquired from file-sharing sites. The report's authors claimed their findings had profound implications for the future of the online music market. |
From what I can see, this is really not much of a surprise since just because one is happy to fork out on an iPod does not mean that they are suddenly willing to start buying music online instead of at the shops, never mind using their credit card online. Some consumers may also prefer to buy CDs instead for other reasons, for example when one purchases a CD, they know they can physically handle the CD and still put it in their PC to transfer to their iPod.
Chances are that many consumers think twice before buying music online, such as wondering what happens after they put in their credit card number (assuming they are confident to even use their credit card online), how they will receive the music they buy or wonder how complicated it may be to create CDs out of the music they purchase. Finally, it is worth noting that as children and teenagers account for a good bulk of the iPod owners, many of these would not even have a credit card to purchase music from iTunes.
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Source: BBC News - Technology
