iTunes Unbothered by Competition

There’re really no solid challengers showing up in the horizon for iTunes, Slyck outlines. In spite of a brief “rivalry” from Napster, MySpace, and Yahoo, these services would soon realize that they were out of breath in this race. Taken from a recent study by Tempo Digital Music Brandscape, iTune's perception as the best digital music store is makes the company unflinching on the market.

Still, the study also brought up some good news for Napster in the way that 72% of those participating in the survey were aware of the Napster product.

Possibly the most significant fact revealed by the study is that iTunes has cemented its top position as "the best" digital music store. This view, however, didn’t get into people’s mind overnight. For example, in 2005, 22% of downloaders considered that Napster was "the best" service, compared to 33% for iTunes. What could have been regarded as a thin 10% lead line has since faded away leaving iTunes in an obviously prevailing position among music stores. Walmart, MySpace, Rhapsody, and Yahoo's remained somewhere in the distance at 5%.

For those still not very clear about why that is –well, you just have to take a look at the iPod/iPhone-iTunes relationship. As the millions of new iPhone and iPods are being sold at a large scale every year, the consumers are naturally oriented towards iTunes due to compatibility issues. Considering that, it's pretty easy to figure out why iPhone users who try out both Napster and iTunes come to the conclusion that the latter is a better deal altogether. However, the term "better" refers actually to the extent to which what service will work with Apple products and not to the real quality of the services.