Over the last few weeks, separate figures for the US and the UK have been published, and the IFPI numbers allow us to put them in a global context.
Apple’s iTunes is the clear leader in the market. It recently announced that it had sold 500m downloads. In January this year, it said it had sold 230m songs to date. Apple’s numbers don’t correspond precisely to the period the IFPI numbers cover, but it’s clear the majority of those 180m songs were downloaded from iTunes, or IFPI is underestimating somewhat.
IFPI also noted that 2.2m music fans are now signed up to subscription services such as those offered by Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo, Virgin, MusicNet et al, up from 1.5m at the end of 2004.
Again, these figures are estimations, but they suggest the subscription market is not achieving the penetration the business models’ proponents might have hoped for. There’s no indication how many songs subscribers have actually grabbed out of their unlimited-download opportunity.
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