AAfter its first full year selling tracks from all four major labels, Amazon's digital music store has become the second-largest a la carte service, according to industry estimates.
But it's a very distant second to iTunes. Major-label sources say that they had hoped the company would have fared better than it did. Amazon has yet to release any sales figures for digital music, and it did not respond to interview requests for this story. But Piper Jaffray financial analyst Gene Munster estimates that Amazon will sell 130 million tracks this year—a paltry sum compared with the 2.4 billion songs iTunes is expected to sell in 2008.
Those figures are skewed by the fact that iTunes operates in more than 20 countries, while Amazon just opened its first foreign store December 3 in the United Kingdom. But analyst estimates put Amazon's digital-music market share at about 8 percent, atop the “everybody else" category of services competing with iTunes. And that figure didn't go up as the year went on.
But it's a very distant second to iTunes. Major-label sources say that they had hoped the company would have fared better than it did. Amazon has yet to release any sales figures for digital music, and it did not respond to interview requests for this story. But Piper Jaffray financial analyst Gene Munster estimates that Amazon will sell 130 million tracks this year—a paltry sum compared with the 2.4 billion songs iTunes is expected to sell in 2008.
Those figures are skewed by the fact that iTunes operates in more than 20 countries, while Amazon just opened its first foreign store December 3 in the United Kingdom. But analyst estimates put Amazon's digital-music market share at about 8 percent, atop the “everybody else" category of services competing with iTunes. And that figure didn't go up as the year went on.
