A new survey from Jupiter Research indicates that the digital music market will grow rapidly from about US$270 million (€221 million) in 2004 to US$1.7 billion (€1.4 billion) in 2009. At that point, digital downloads will account for 12% of consumer music spending.
These new sales are expected to end the four years of declining sales, but won’t bring the industry back to its 1999 level of activities. Nor are downloads expected to start cannibalising CD sales any time soon.
Subscription services are expected to become more popular than downloads in the long run – on this, JupiterResearch VP and Senior Analyst David Card says: “The so-called celestial jukebox is in sight. But for now, it will appeal to music aficionados. The U.S. music industry must manage digital music as one of a series of incremental revenue streams, one that is in the same scale as licensing.”
US sales of digital music players are expected to grow by more than 50% per year for the next few years. Interestingly, the survey showed that 77% of consumers who would buy a player did not feel they needed more than 1000 songs on a player at any one time, irrespective of the size of their music collection.
Jupiter Research
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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