“Apple Inc. sold a record 21 million iPods for the holiday quarter, which helped boost the company’s revenues by 50% and accounted for sales of $3.43 billion–half of Apple’s total sales for the quarter, the company reported this week,” Emily Burg reports in an updated article for MediaPost’s MarketingDaily.
Burg reports, “Stellar sales have earned the iPod a 72% share of the portable music player market. Microsoft’s Zune, meanwhile, recorded 2.8% of the market for December, and 10.2% of all 30GB hard drive models sold, according to retail research firm NPD Group.”
A note at the bottom of Burg’s article states, “This article was modified after the original publication to correct the market share figures.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: It’s good to see Burg’s original article corrected. Note that NPD does not report sales from Apple Retail Stores, the Apple Store online, Wal-Mart, or Amazon, among others. Add those retail outlets’ sales into the mix and one could reasonably assume that Apple’s iPod share is actually quite a bit larger and the Zune’s share quite a bit lower than NPD’s figures of 72% and 2.8% respectively. Due to limited reporting, the actual NPD market share numbers aren’t nearly as important as the trends they show; Apple’s iPod share as measured by NPD is up 36.4% year-over-year.
Related articles:
NPD: Zune sees ‘10.2%’ share of music player market in Dec., no word on post-Xmas returns [UPDATED] – January 19, 2007
NPD: Apple iPod gains market share over holidays, up 36% year-over-year – January 03, 2007
This is entirely unrelated, but yesterday at Best Buy, there was a sign advertising Vista. It read: Vista…the “Wow” starts Now!
I burst out laughing.
Proof positive. The Zune rocks. It is the social. Just wait until Vista is out. Vista + Zune = nirvana.
The social gets better.
ZT
Your potential, our passion.
wheres Zune Tang?
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waiting 4 his comment
i typed slow..i guess
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..une
>Just wait until Vista is out.
whats the big deal ..after all vista is a osX rip off..remember?
It’s amazing Zune Tang can function.
“Your potential, our passion.” That was a good one. You made me laugh.
Any word yet whether M$ has Zune software working on Vista?
Last report I saw said it didn’t.
Your Passion. Our impotential.
Vista. The Wow Starts Now. And Stop When it Ships.
Microsucks.
Your problem, our software.
Oops – Vista and Best Buy do go together. Neither one is really any good.
These figures beg the question “how the hell did Monkeyboy think they captured 25%?”. I mean seriously, has he been on vacation to Krypton for the past few months or something? Delusions of grandeur still make you delusional. Wait for evolution into a man before speaking next time. Clearly intelligent thought is “over” his head.
I am a servant of the Secret Fire.
You shall not pass.
-m
25% of MS employees who have the smarts to hide the iPod when Ballmer lurches by!
“how the hell did Monkeyboy think they captured 25%?”
Well, first, you can always adjust statistics to fit your purview. Pick the vendors that sold the most Zunes and that’s your statistical set.
My favorite, though, is that Zune had 10% of the 30GB hard-drive-based music players. Apple used to do this–the iPod had a very high percentage of the hard-disk player market before Apple had a flash-based music player. I agree that it wasn’t fair for Apple to be judged against the Flash market, since they didn’t have a competing player in that market. So I suppose it’s okay for Microsoft to narrow the field to 30GB hard-drive-based music players.
But, at that point, they’re competing against the iPod, the Creative Zen Vision:M, and I think that’s about it (iRiver has discontinued it’s hard-drive-based players). So between the iPod and the Zen, there was only 10% that Microsoft could eke out? That’s pretty funny.
Incredible! Exactly as I predicted. My post on the original article questioned the 10.2%, as perhaps referring only to HD MP3 players, or more likely just 30Gig HD MP3 players, just as has been corrected; otherwise, the numbers and percentages just don’t make any sense.
The numbers still look rather odd! When you look at 2.8%, it implies that 27.5% of the MP3 player market is composed of 30Gig models. Seems a bit high to me. Also, it implies that of the 29million MP3 players sold, 8million are 30Gig models, and that 800k were Zunes. Those numbers still seem high.
Does anyone care about the Zune? It’s a flop and everyone knows it. The only people still talking about that dog is… us!
And what’s with Zune Tang? He’s a comedian, right? Nobody could possibly be that seriously deluded. I’m sure he thinks he’s funny and possibly even ironic – like a nerd performance artist. I just think he’s boring. Same joke over and over again.
If Vista is “wow”, Leopard will be “whoa”
Ballmer was able to twist the facts by choosing his words carefully. I believe he said something like, “Some estimates…blah blah blah”.
Right, and “some estimates” show that Jessica Alba will appear naked at my front door some night soon.
There is some faulty analysis going on here. Apple sold 21m iPods WORLDWIDE. The NPD figures I believe apply only to the US. As we already know, they also exclude places like Apple stores and Amazon.
So, you can’t take the 21m figure and Apple’s 72% share and calculate the market was 29m MP3 players, and then work back to the number of Zunes!
Remember also that Zune is sold only in the US. If it was 10% of the global market, then that would imply a much higher percentage of the US market.
If I had to make a back-of-the-envelope guess, it would be that (based on Apple’s sales in the US being less than 50% of total worldwide sales), Apple sold around 10m of it’s 21m iPods in the US in that period. If that 72% and 2.8% is correct (my guess is Apple sells a LOT through its own stores and Amazon), then the overall market is 13.8m in the US, and Zune would have sold around 380,000. If NPD’s numbers had quantities rather than just %, then we could do this more accurately. I would still think that the 380,000 number is too high given Amazon and Apple store performance, and given that I hear zero reports of Zune’s being seen in the wild.
There’s your stats lesson for the day. Make sure you know exactly what is being measured. And, my US friends, don’t forget the big wide rest of the world out there!
According to quantum theory, there IS a non-zero chance that Jessica Alba will show up naked at your door!
In all honesty, Apple’s NPD marketshare is up quite a bit because Apple kept the channel much better supplied this year. That said, Apple’s own channel is non-trivial and Apple has to have a total share of 75-80%. And ALL those people have their content in iTunes. Which, although not a LOCK-in, it does require effort and motivation to switch.
But hey, all of BillyG’s horses and all of MonkeyBoy’s men and 100s of millions of dollars make MS quite the formidable foe for Creative in the non-iPod, hard drive market. And in the non-iPod,hard drive based market, Microsoft is
NUMBER TWO!!!
Oh great job guys, you’re huge marketing effort beat that Gigabeat!!!
I thought that Steve Ballmer said that the Zune had 20% market share of the high end … not likely … if they have 10% of 30gb space that means that they probably have 5-6% of large hard drive market … Go Monkeyboy ….
Still this is more than I had thought. They must have sold 1 million or so units by now, which is not bad for the Zune. Too bad that they do not have iTunes MS or AppleTV or iPhone. The key to this market is Compliments … just like it is software and peripherals for the PC … iPod has all the accessories you could imagine … zune has not so many.
Ciao
Magic Word “effort” as in “good effort M$”
“Too bad that they do not have iTunes MS or AppleTV or iPhone. “
Hmm.
iTunes MS = Zune MS
AppleTV = Windows Media Center Extender
iPhone = Windows Mobile 5
In two of the three examples you give, MS already has a substantial lead in the market compared to Apple, and Apple is the one copying and playing catch up.
So MS gets 10% of the market they currently play in with the much maligned Zune 1.0.
That’s about the same as they get with V1.0 of any product. When Zune 2.0 hits the streets, with all Zune 1.0 criticisms fixed, where will Apple be?