Online Market research firm NPD’s annual survey of Internet users found that about 10 percent of the music people with internet connections (currently about 80 percent in the U.S) acquired last year came from paid downloads trhough online music services such as Apple’s iTunes or Amazon.com. This marks a significant increase from 7 percent two years ago. But since the number of physical CDs they bought plummeted, the overall share of music they paid for fell to 42 percent from 48 percent.
Plus: NPD’s most recent data shows, how well Amazon.com’s five-month-old digital music store is doing made. All four major labels are allowing the e-commerce giant to sell their songs as MP3 files, without any protection against illegal copying. Their goal is to win over some people who may have been stealing music and also to create a counterbalance against Apple, which some in the music industry believe has too much power.
The NPD data for February show that so far Amazon has had a strong start, although it is still tiny. It now has one-tenth the market share of Apple in the United States. Since Apple has largely dominated the per-track download sales, that makes Amazon the distant No.2 in the market according to the NPD statistics. That would give Amazon’s digital store an overall share of the American music market of about 2 percent.
