Current Market
Recently, there has been a boom in "boutique" music stores that cater to specific audiences.
There are also an increasing amount of new services popping up that enable musicians to sell their music directly to fans without the need for a 3rd party. These type of services usually use e-commerce enabled web widgets that embed into many types of web pages. This turns each web page into the musician's own online music store.
A more recent development allows the instant downloading of radio-songs, as they are broadcast, straight to a mobile phone in less than 60 seconds. This technical innovation from Sweden, called DROPme, represents a different channel and consumer behavior relative to the online services.
As of April 2008, one of the largest online music service is iTunes Store with around 80% of the market. On April 3, 2008 iTunes Store surpassed Wal-Mart as the biggest music retailer in the US, a milestone in the music industry as it is the first time in history that an online music retailer exceeds those of physical music formats.
Recently, online music stores--especially iTunes--have seen a marked increase in sales. Consumers are beginning to shift away from the purchase of compact discs (CD's) in favor of purchasing albums from online music stores, or more commonly, purchasing individual songs. The iTunes platform has been the main reason for this shift, as it originally sold every song in its library for 99 cents. Historically, albums would be sold for about five times the cost of a single, but iTunes was selling every song for a tenth of the price of an album. However, in order to increase album sales, iTunes has instituted a program titled "Complete My Album," which offers a discounted prices on the full album, if a consumer has already purchased one or more songs.
Read more about this topic: Online Music Store
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