iPod Has 76% Market Share?

WPW_Feedbot · #1 (**permalink**) 06-21-2005, 08:06 AM

Lost in the jetstream of Apple's switch to Intel chips was an amazing statistic on iPod market share. During Steve Jobs' speech at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference this week, he claimed the iPod owns 76 percent of the American portable music player market. (Macworld's got it here and Engadget's got it here.)

It's worth taking a look at the European perspective on this, because the picture is a bit different over here. Cheap, flash-based MP3 players found a significant early audience in Europe, and as a result self-reported MP3 player penetration is much higher here than in the US.

Jupiter's most recent consumer survey on brand of MP3 player owned was conducted in the UK in November 2004. I'll take a moment to stress that this is self-reported data, from the UK only, taken before the Christmas season and before the iPod Shuffle was introduced. But in that survey, 28 percent of UK consumers who own an MP3 player said they owned an iPod (which at that point were only available in hard drive form). 43 percent said they owned a non-Apple hard drive player, and 30 percent said they owned a non-Apple flash drive player.

Again, this was pre-Christmas and pre-Shuffle. Based on their recent strength, Apple's numbers in the UK and throughout Europe will certainly have risen since this survey was done. Still, though, it's a different picture to what they're seeing in the US, and that carries significant implications for both the MP3 player market and the digital music market in Europe.

For more on this topic, check out Mark Mulligan's Digital Music Players in the UK: Segmenting a Diverse Audience report and my Portable Music Players: Broadening Appeal to Attract Mainstream Consumers report.

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