iTunes Continues to Flourish as CD Sales Drop Further

Latest reports show that iTunes is cleaning house in the music business world, claiming the 2nd spot in music sales for all of 2007, coming short of beating Wal-Mart. As it turns out, people do actually purchase their music at Wal-Mart. The fact that iTunes took the second spot bodes incredibly well for downloadable music as a whole, but not so well for actual CD sales.

As someone who regularly purchases hard CDs, I hate to see the format go downhill so fast, especially since it’s the only way to make sure you have a perfect backup and high-quality version of the music. It’s for those reasons that I can never see myself going to an online-only method of purchasing music, but like many others, I am hoping that the industry as a whole will begin offering downloadable lossless music. It’s sure to happen, it’s just a matter of when and how prevalent it will be.

Overall though, this news is a huge win for Apple, but since they are still without the “big four”, there’s no telling is Amazon (or someone else) is going to catch up. iTunes has a great hold on people though, so shaking people off of it would be a feat in itself.

Despite the heightened P2P activity, which is estimated to be used in 19% of American households, NDP states that 10% of all music purchased in 2007 was legally downloaded via sites such as iTunes or Amazon. The number of consumers who legally downloaded music grew to 29 million consumers, whereas previous sales figures placed that number at 24 million. Sales growth can largely be attributed to consumers in the 36 to 50 age group, which also happened to purchase a large number of digital music players in the same year.

Source: DailyTech