There’s hardly any doubt who the king of digital music is, iTunes has long been the “big daddy” of downloadable tunes. However, Asymco analyst Horace Dediu and Billboard’s Glenn Peoples were nice enough to spell it out in a little more detail.
Dediu, incorporating new numbers released from Apple yesterday, pegs iTunes music spending at $6.9 billion a year. Peoples, riffing off numbers provided by the music industry’s international trade group, pegs total consumer spending on digital music at about $9.3 billion a year.
So basically, Apple owns about 75% of the digital music market, leaving the crumbs for a group that includes Amazon, Pandora, Rhapsody, and the like.
This does explain in part why music companies are always rooting for a competitor, any competitor, to come along and go up against the Cupertino firm.
On the other side of the coin, Apple doesn’t enjoy the same lock on all forms of digital music it once enjoyed, as it keeps an eye on the growth of streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora. Apple’s recently announced iTunes Radio service is an obvious attempt to dominate the streaming music category much as they have the downloadable music market.
