Digital whips Offline...iTunes largest music retailer!

iTunes Store Top Music Retailer in the US

Just read this release - WOW! (No wonder Douglas left to become the EMI Digital Business President)

It's finally happened...there are two stats that's really hit me this year; Internet media consumption in the USA, per week, has finally surpassed TV media consumption...and now this one;

Apple's itunes in Jan this year has surpassed Wallmart to become the largest music retailer in the USA.

Marketshare: Apple 19% and Walmart 15%

Interesting note: This marketshare and percentages are based upon both physical and online stores combined

Another note: 30% of all music bought is downloaded in the USA!

Interesting snippets re this subject;

Elvis Costello's band to release their new album in vinyl and digital download only - they're skipping CD's completely! Cool ;)

Sony BMG and Amazon did this press release - did you know Amazon sells the largest collection of DRM free MP3's in the world? Check this out - NOTE: Only available in the USA unfortunately;

Launched in September 2007, Amazon MP3 offers Earth’s Biggest Selection of a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.1 million songs from more than 270,000 artists. Every song and album in the Amazon MP3 music download store is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software and is encoded at 256 Kbps to deliver high audio quality. Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, including PCs, Macs®, iPod®, Zune®, Zen®, iPhone™, RAZR™ and BlackBerry®; organize their music using any music management application such as iTunes® or Windows Media Player™; and burn songs to CDs for personal use.