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Now That’s Market Dominance

Via AlwaysOn, I read tonight that Apple’s iPod owns 92% (registration required) of the ‘high-capacity music player’ market. They’ve truly decimated the competition, and done so with great technology (marketing spin on the new colour iPod notwithstanding). If I hadn’t tried out a craptacular Lyra MP3 player from RCA (it’s not even listed in their product section anymore–are they ashamed?), I’d probably never have seen another high-capacity music player. Walking around the city, I only ever see iPods (or their telltale white headphones).

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Darren Barefoot is an author, speaker and digital strategist. He’s the co-founder of Capulet Communications, and co-author of “Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook”.

5 comments

  1. But do they dominate the portable player market? If you ride the bus from the suburbs, you’ll probably see a lot more non-iPods (e.g. tiny MP3 players, CD players, etc) than “telltale white headphones”.

  2. I’m sorry, but that just seems like such a small segment of a bigger market.

    I mean, they don’t have 92% of music players. They don’t even have 92% of digital music players. Nope, it’s “high capacity” music players.

    I wonder how much of the market that is overall, but I somehow suspect that they’re dwarfed by the likes of Panasonic and it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t even match the number of MP3-playing CD players that Koss pumps out.

    Sometimes spin sure seems like just spin.

  3. Good points. Personally, I probably still see as many CD players as MP3 players. I have no sense of the relative markets (and revenue) of high-capacity vs. low-capacity players. Obviously, you’d probably need to sell three of the latter for every one of the former, all other factors being equal.

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