Thursday, October 09, 2008

iTunes still miles ahead in digital music world

Another twelve months of launches of iTunes killing services in, and how is iTunes looking?

Pretty good actually. Tempo have just delivered their latest survey of consumer awareness of the digital market and while Amazon and Rhapsody have both grown a little in terms of awareness and people choosing them as the 'best' service, iTunes has also continued to grow and the prevailing wisdom of twelve months ago - that other services are fighting over small slices of second-place pie - seems just as solid today.

The 'some other' choice [pdf] as best service (excluding those three, Yahoo, Napster, WalMart and Napster) has declined over twelve months from 20% to just 9%, suggesting that small services are suffering if not an absolute decline, then at least an ability to keep pace with the big names.

The have you ever heard of... [pdf] question has some interesting results, too. Naturally, iTunes is out in front here, but Napster retains a second place position in both aided and unprompted recall and is the only brand other than Apple's to make it into double-digit unaided memory. That, presumably, is what Best Buy was paying for.

Zune is struggling - without someone saying 'have you heard of Zune', only 1% of respondents thought of it when asked about online music stores - amusingly, exactly the same proportion of respondents who offered MSN when asked. CBS might be slightly worried to discover that Last FM has fixed itself in nobody's minds at all, and even with coaxing only 6% of the survey went "oh, yeah, Last FM."

Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, will be stroking his white cat with glee - MySpace might only have got one out of a hundred people thinking of it as a music destination - but when prompted, the brand recognition shot up to 63%. Third place.

The battle for that second place pie is getting interesting - although obviously in this context the eventual winner will be whoever pours enough money into marketing.

No mention of spiralfrog, oddly.


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