14 DAY TRIAL // With the iPhone due for launch at the end of the week, Apple's other services and products tend to get buried in the avalanche of news, reports and rumors about the mobile phone. But this doesn't mean that Apple's offerings are becoming irrelevant, quite the contrary, and the company is pushing forward on all cylinders. The iTunes Store has now become the third largest retailer of music in the United States.
Apple's iTunes Store overtook Amazon.com in the first quarter with nearly a 10 percent market share, according to a survey by NPD Group. The market leaders are still Wal-Mart Stores, with 15.8%, and Best Buy Co, with 13.8% but Apple's service is definitely closing the gap and is top dog in the online space. For comparison, online store bestbuy.com has only a 1.1 percent market share, while Amazon.com Inc. has a 6.7 percent share, making it the fourth largest United States retailer.
The high number of iPods sold during the holiday season is likely an important factor in the success of iTunes, and, recently, developments such as the partnership with EMI to bring higher-quality DRM-free tracks to the table also contributed to it. Apple has started to push the music management software that accesses the store even harder, the iPhone needing it in order to register the purchase and handle the syncing with a computer. Apple has also begun partnering with various social networking sites such as Bebo and Yahoo Japan, offering tight integration with iTunes and one click access to the store.
While it is still too early to see the effects of these partnerships, if Apple continues down this track and keeps forging new ones, the iTunes Sore will start becoming as ubiquitous as the iPod is. Hardware will also contribute, with new devices such as the iPhone and new generation of iPods sparking new interest both in music and in movies.