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Download stores still dominate despite rising streaming services, says NPD

By | Published on Wednesday 17 April 2013

Apple

Previously stated theories that the download era would render the album format redundant and that the streaming era would render downloads obsolete have not proven to be true, according to new research by the NPD Group based on digital music consumption in the US last year, though I suppose the latter prediction could still come to pass if and when subscription-based music services go mainstream.

The new NPD report reckons that about 44 million Americans paid to download music last year, which is pretty much consistent with the previous two years, despite the recent growth of streaming services in the US market. Meanwhile the amount of money the average downloader spends has gone up, partly, it seems, because of the growth of album downloads over single track purchases.

Unsurprisingly iTunes remains the dominant player in the download space, with NPD reckoning the Apple download store still has 63% market share in the US (based on Q4 stats from 2012), with Amazon in second place accounting for 22% of the market in terms of revenue. Though, says NPD, 80% of digital music buyers mainly downloaded from iTunes.

Commenting on the new report, NPD’s Russ Crupnick told CMU: “Since the launch of Apple’s iTunes store, digital music downloads have become the dominant revenue source for the recorded music industry and iTunes continues to be the dominant retailer. There’s a belief that consumers don’t need to buy music because of streaming options, when in fact streamers are much more likely than the average consumer to buy music downloads”.

NPD said that, based on its research, over a third of consumers still want to own their music collections, while just under a third said they still enjoyed listening to full albums. And of the Pandora users the company surveyed, 41% said they still wanted to own their favourite tracks, in addition to accessing music via a streaming platform (though, of course, Pandora doesn’t offer quite the level of on-demand interactivity of some of its rivals).



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