James Delahunty
3 Oct 2005 11:00
According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), music downloaders spent over $790m on digital downloads in the first half of 2005. That's an increase of 259% over the same period of 2004, where $220m was spend on music downloads. Of the total figure, the music industry scooped up $440m and the retailers shared $350m, most of which would have went to Apple due to the dominance of iTunes in the music download market.
This means that during H1 2005, music download sales accounted for 6% of all record industry sales. The figure includes normal music downloads and also subscription based music rental services, but it also included ringtone sales though polyphonic and monophonic tones were not included. 44 cents of every dollar of the revenue went to the retailers, which is more than the past 33% figure that was believed to be Apple's cut.
However it wasn't all good news for the music industry which saw yet another slide of sales of music on physical media. Worldwide physical media sales fell by 6.3% to $12.4bn. Unit sales fell 6.6%. In the case of music CDs, sales were down 6.7% by value and 3.4% by units. Overall the global music market fell by 1.5% to $13.2bn compared to $13.4bn in the same period of 2004.
Source:
The Register