Posted on Wednesday, September 20 2006 @ 5:10 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
A new research shows only one in five European iPod owners regularly buys songs online.
Europe's digital music market is expected to double to 385 million euros ($487.1 million) in 2006 from a year ago, Jupiter Research said on Monday, but iPod owners on average buy only 20 tracks a year from Apple Computer Inc.'s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) market-leading iTunes music store.
About 83 percent of iPod owners throughout Europe do not regularly buy digital music, the study found, although they are more apt to do so than owners of other portable media devices.
"The model isn't broken, there's just lots of room for improvement," Jupiter analyst Mark Mulligan said. "Digital music is really underperforming its potential."
The study found that 30 percent of iPod owners illegally swap songs using file-sharing networks and another 23 percent listen to Web-based audio files for free legally.
Read more at
Reuters.
