iTunes is still king with over two-thirds of the online music market according to NPD, but Amazon is solidifying its #2 status with prominent position on Android devices.
The latest NPD data has iTunes at 69.9%, Amazon at 11.6% and Zune, Walmart, Napster and Rhapsody all coming in at 1-2% for the Jan-March calendar year.
While Rhapsody took the biggest yearly fall to 1.3% down from 4% in the Jan-Mar 2009 time period, Amazon was far away a winner in both the last two years moving from 4% in 2008 doubling to almost 8% in 2009 and coming in just below 12% this year.
When reviewing sales of digital music separately from CDs, NPD’s MusicWatch data revealed that iTunes’s share of the digital-music download retail market has remained essentially flat since Q1 2009 — growing just one percentage point to reach 70 percent of the digital music market last quarter. At the same time, AmazonMP3 grew by 4 percentage-points to reach 12 percent
Why is Amazon cruising while others are stagnant or losing ground? NPD data last month showed that Android’s US sales are booming relative to iPhone and with Amazon’s MP3 store featured prominently on Android devices (Nexus One w/Froyo pictured), a lot more Android users were downloading music. Amazon doesn’t break out or even publish numbers, but you can bet that the growth of Android has helped Amazon.
It isn’t certain what role, if any, Amazon will have in the new ‘over the air’ streaming media Android Market that was demonstrated at Google I/O. That should certainly be a concern for Amazon, which has done extremely well with Android and figures to be featured not only in Android phones, but also tablets and GoogleTV.
In total music sales, iTunes was still the leader with 28%. Amazon, which sells both MP3s and CDs is now tied with Walmart for second place at 12%.