“Apple Computer Inc. continued to lead the U.S. digital music player market in the second quarter with a 75.6 percent share, according to the NPD Group. ‘Apple has done a great job of focusing consumers’ attention on digital music in their products through millions of dollars in advertising,’ said Ross Rubin, analyst at the NPD Group, via e-mail,” Dan Nystedt reports for IDG News Service.
“SanDisk Corp. followed Apple in the second quarter ranking with a 9.7 percent market share, according to the NPD Group, while Creative Technology Ltd. took third with 4.3 percent of the U.S. digital music player market,” Nystedt reports.
U.S. standalone digital music player market in the second quarter, 2006:
1. Apple – 75.6%
2. SanDisk – 9.7%
3. Creative – 4.3%
4. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. – 2.5%
5. Sony Electronics Inc. – 1.9%
Source: The NPD Group
Full article here.
From the “don’t hold your breath if you enjoy life” file:
• SanDisk’s iDont campaign takes on Apple iPod – May 22, 2006
• Creative declares ‘war’ on Apple iPod, shoots for 40% market share of MP3 players – December 21, 2004
• Samsung: we will take top spot in music players from Apple by 2007 – January 09, 2006
• Sony Connect President in wake of iPod nano: ‘we will accelerate our challenge’ to Apple iPod – September 08, 2005
• Microsoft confirms ‘iPod Killer’ plans – July 21, 2006
Related articles:
Zune: Apple cannot lose. Microsoft cannot win. – July 26, 2006
More blood on Apple iTunes Music Store’s play button: MyCokeMusic is dead – June 20, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: iRiver gives up on digital media player market – May 23, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Sony’s Walkman Bean is cooked – February 13, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Dell dumps ‘DJ’ hard-drive MP3 player line – February 04, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: iRiver pulling out of Europe? – February 01, 2006
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Thomson gives up on MP3 player, CE markets – December 12, 2005
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: BenQ withdraws from MP3 player markets – November 28, 2005
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Olympus halts production of portable digital music players – November 09, 2005
More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Rio is dead – August 26, 2005
Apple’s iPod has blood on its Click Wheel: Virgin Electronics is dead – March 08, 2005
Apple’s iTunes Music Store has blood on its play button: BuyMusic.com is dead – March 28, 2004
The other suckers are gonna be scrambling when zUne shows up. It might flop though, given MS track record
So much for Sim Wong Ding Dong’s “War” he declared on Apple.
If you guys believe Zune will fail the same way creative & sandisk have failed with their devices, think twice. that’s my only advice.
microsoft has big backings world wide. and they can make their OS ( dominant power currently ) be Zune friendly.
If you compare this to Apple’s 1st quarter share of 75%, its share actually went UP 0.6%
That means that DESPITE all of the “negative” publicity Apple has been getting lately, it’s share in music players and computers is still going up.
Wow… SanDisk’s 2nd place sure sounds a lot better when you are not looking at the numbers. 2nd place SanDisk is closer to oblivion than it is to Apple’s iPod.
People who think “Zune” is gonna take Apple’s market-share are buffoons. I feel bad for Creative. MS is gonna finish them off.
I guess Sony hasn’t sold very many Walkman Beans.
That’s pretty solid for Apple given that they did not release any new mnodels during Q2. What is it going to be when they launch the 8MB nano and 160MB touch screen iPod Video in Q4?
Watch out Apple there is a lot of vapor ware that is the bomb!
This imaginary hardware can do incredible imaginary things.
Just imagine … and it’s doing it. In your imagination.
… Meanwhile … Apple IS selling iPods – Now – not in your imagination.
You can use your imagination for more productive things now – thanks to Apple.
I’m still amazed at that number, it’s so
dominant and that’s so hard to do when there are
so many companies trying to grab a percentage here and there.
I wish I could see Zune on that list…maybe it will sqeeeze inbetween Sony and Samsung. MS will sink a lot of money into Zune, I love it. I can’t wait to watch MS drop large sums into it, trust me Ballmer will not give up on it, he will sink every dollar the stock holders will allow him.
Probably worse, Jeff. I mean, you could only hold 2 songs on the 8 and about 40 songs on the 160.
What? Nobody is holding off that purchase, waiting for Microsoft’s fabled Zune?
Jeff,
just what I was thinking.
Even if it’s just non-scratch ‘Nanos’ and larger capacity iPod videos before Xmas, then Apple will pull even further away from the others.
Yo Bones!
You are correct with Ballmer’s mentality – he will continue to bleed profits from Windows and Office in order to gain market share in yet another profit losing segment of the market.
M$ governance keeps selling the montra “It is part of our overall strategey…”
“First, we will ensure Vista is years late, and does not deliver much.
Secondly, we will stubbornly deny Apple’s consumer business model in music and media is better than ours, and will wait until we are so far behind the game we have no choice but to lose money for virtually ever in this market…
Lastly, we of course have our money losing division in xBOX. It may be profitable some day, but we doubt it…”
BOTTOM LINE:
M$ shareholders are idots. In the past six years, the stock has done nothing but virtually tank, while they have let Gates and Ballmer run the business into the ground. Why? Because the shareholders treat Gates and his groupies like Golden Calfs, not to be touched. These people are holding onto the golden years, while their investment goes up in smoke. Morons. Gates is moving out of the way – fine. But Ballmer should have been fired years ago. Redmond’s board of directors is inept – and it’s shareholders even more so…
i’m really curious what the numbers are like with international market share. the USA is a huge economy but the rest of the world makes up 50%? of Apple’s sales? They’re growth markets.
zune=xbox
“If you guys believe Zune will fail the same way creative & sandisk have failed with their devices, think twice”
Well, I do think Zune can be in the 5-10% market share, mostly by displacing Creative and SanDisk, etc, though a good bet is that most of their initial market share will come from those comanies.. So in some way, I do expect them to “fail” in that they will have a similar market share to Creative and SanDisk. However, I do agree that Zune is backed by deeper pockets than anyone else, so it will get more advertising $ and more than enough time to succeed.
“microsoft has big backings world wide. and they can make their OS ( dominant power currently ) be Zune friendly.”
Yes, they do have “big backings world wide”. Yes, “they can make their OS be Zune friendly”. But will they? Obvioulsy, it will work, but will the ease of use be the same as iTunes/iPod/iTMS (which, by the way, is “friendly” to Windows and OSX…all this without the “big backings” of MS)? MS has consistently shown a everything-plus-what-went-down-the-kitchen-sink mentality to their software design. For Word, having every possible feature is great. For trying to just do basic operations on a media player, the results so far have been mediocre. Why hide the most useful and most used features in maze like menus with mystifying organization? Only MS knows for sure.
This gets to the bottom of why Zune is NOT the same as XBox. XBox is based on more processor speed, more HD space, more features. Success in digital music players seems to be related to ease of use and seemless inegration, neither of which is an MS strongpoint.
I don’t think Apple needs to release a vastly redesigned nano nor one that has more capacity. They just need to release them in more styles; like special edition nanos with international artists designing the art on them rather than stickers. That and more colours is enough to attract buyers even without a new design.
Inventory will be a greater headache though but then investigate how sports shoe companies do it.
microsoft has big backings world wide. and they can make their OS ( dominant power currently ) be Zune friendly.
Microsoft is not skilled in making Windows “friendly” to anything. I’m not being a smartass — this is established truth. It it highly unlikely that anything designed by Microsoft’s Windows software department will work as cleanly as iTunes.
True, the XBox guys are in charge of Zune, and they have a decent track record. But the XBox project didn’t have to deal with Windows.
The theory that big advertising dollars translates to big sale is just rubbish.
The public aren’t stupid and M$ shouting loudly by spending big on Zune advertising won’t save it if it turns out to be rubbish, which I fully expect it to be.
No major worries for Apple here. They have to continue along the same path.
Fun quote from the article:
“Rubin says that companies focused on stand alone digital music players should remain competitive against the mobile phone industry because their devices have greater capacity, better user interfaces, better integration with online music services, and stronger DRM support.”
I know when I go buy a music player, the first question I ask is, “Does this have strong DRM support?”
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“If you guys believe Zune will fail the same way creative & sandisk have failed with their devices, think twice. that’s my only advice. microsoft has big backings world wide. and they can make their OS ( dominant power currently ) be Zune friendly.”
Well, they will have some issues making their OS be Zune friendly. That’s an antitrust trial waiting to happen. If Microsoft offers some magic hooks into the Operating System that they don’t offer to others, Microsoft could see itself smacked down hard by antitrust regulators in Korea and Japan.
That said, I do believe that Microsoft can come out with a “better” player than SanDisk or Creative. But I don’t think they’ll come out with something that will end-up beating Apple.
To succeed at making iPod/iTunes irrelevant, MSFT has to convince about 95% of consumers to pick Zune over iPod from Day One, and it has to convince about 80% of iPod customers whose unit dies or needs to be otherwise replaced or upgraded to switch to Zune.
To do that, they’re going to need more than an advertising budget: they’re going to need a cost-competitive, easy-to-use CE device that everyone from 12-75 can use and an integrated music/entertainment librarian to match. If they can execute on that without making me laugh and without Apple answering back with improvements to the iPod/iTunes/iTMS platform experience, then they deserve to win and Apple deserves to have its ass handed to it on a plate.
But I have to admit, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Microsoft brand name will be Zune’s greatest disadvantage, not advantage. The best thing Microsoft could do is create an consumer electronics subsidiary and keep the name “Microsoft” as far away from its marketing as possible. Maybe use “Xbox” instead…
Microsoft will likely have a tremendously successful first two quarters selling Zunes to be followed with growing consumer disappointment and a steady slide to irrelevancy.
Here’s how Microsoft thinks:
Population of the U.S. = ~300 billion
Population of the world = ~6.5 trillion
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
# of iPods sold so far = ~60 billion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod
Therefore:
~240 billion people (80%) in the U.S. don’t have iPods, and
~6.1 trillion people (99.07%) in the world don’t have iPods
So, see, Apple doesn’t even 10% of the potential market share. All Microsoft has to do advertise/market/sell Zune to *these* people. <hehehe>
ds. =)
Los Angeles, CA