Zune Eats Creative’s Meager Lunch, Grabbing 4 Percent of MP3 Player Market
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By Eliot Van Buskirk
- May 12, 2008 |
- 7:33 am |
- Categories: Digital Music News
Apple’s share of the MP3 player market share dropped a single point to 71 percent, according to the NPD Group’s study, but its lead is still monstrous. The bigger loser between Q1 2007 and Q1 2008 was Creative, which saw its share halved to two percent.
Update: A Creative spokesman points out one problem with NPD
Group’s data: it does not track sales at arguably the nation’s mostimportant retail outlet. "One thing to consider about NPD - they don’t trackWal-Mart, which is a huge retailer for MP3 players and a very largecustomer of ours. That’s why the data from NPD does not accuratelyconvey market share." Fair enough.
Creative seems to be reacting by doubling down on what has always been its core business: sound cards and peripherals, rather than its MP3 players, which have traditionally featured excellent sound quality and long battery life but haven’t caught on with the vast majority of users. Microsoft’s abandonment of the PlaysforSure ecosystem for its Zune platform likely contributed to its fate.
SanDisk, which has the advantage of making its own flash memory, continued to leverage its strong relationship with Best Buy to increase its share to 11 percent.
Microsoft recently updated its Zune firmware with new features: television episode downloads, Zune Card milestone badges and friend syncing, a "now playing" indicator for Windows Live Messenger, drag-and-drop track renaming, genre sorting and smart on-the-fly playlist creation.
See Also:
- SanDisk Thinks MicroSD Is the New CD
- Hands-On With the Leaked Sandisk Fuze MP3 Player
- Coming Soon: The Joy Division Zune (Updated)
- Microsoft Zune Pays Bonus to Indie Labels
(Via Music Ally; Image from PMPToday)
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