Mint.com, the online financial management tool, has put its numbers together with market researchers NPD Group to analyze music spending. The results: when it comes to consuming recorded music, digital music continues to rise. At the same time, so does Apple’s grip on the music consumption market, a combination that includes proprietary control of a music store, a music player, and the leading mobile device.
The NPD data should look familiar. Digital music is growing, and clearly it’s at the root of the record industry’s loss of revenue as consumers shift from physical to digital media. Also, Apple’s iTunes remains the lion’s share of the market – enough so that they effectively control distribution, pricing, and consumption patterns, the very definition of monopoly by most measures. (That’s even before you get to Apple’s effective monopoly over the computer player and mobile device, though my suspicion is that an all-out attack on the portable device could start to chisel away at all three.)
