Report: Apple Has 26 Percent of Music Sales

By

iTunes

Apple’s iTunes has widened its lead over traditional music sellers, capturing 26.6 percent of digital music sales in 2009, up from 21.4 percent in 2008 – the year Apple became the No. 1 destination for music sales.

Walmart, which had held the title of top digital music store, fell further behind iTunes with 12.5 percent of the 2009 market, down from 14.9 percent in 2008, according to a May 22 Billboard survey. Other bricks-and-mortar music vendors, such as Best Buy and Target, also lost ground.


Other online digital music destinations, such as Amazon and RealNetworks, are just a shadow of iTunes. Amazon jumped to 7.07 percent, while RealNetworks rose to 1.23 percent of the market, up from 1.21 percent, according to the survey.

But brick-and-mortar music sales didn’t take the worst drubbing – that was saved for the proponents of mobile music sales. Remember the PR put out about buying tunes from your cell phone? Well, that message apparently fell like a lead balloon. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and mobile content company Zed combined could only muster 4.9 percent of the digital music sales market in 2009. If that wasn’t bad enough, the figure is down from 6.6 percent in 2008.

[via Fortune and Billboard]

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