By CNET News.com staff, 22 September 2004 09:15
NEWS The worldwide market for MP3 players will hit$58bn by 2008, according to a new study by IDC.
The impending competition that awaits Apple's extremely popular iPod music player is the focus of the IDC study. The market researcher said several vendors are set to launch portable jukeboxes based on 1-inch or smaller hard drives, which could pose a tough challenge to iPod.
The biggest growth in MP3 players should come from portable flash players, the IDC report predicted. The volume of flash players shipped will jump to 50 million units in 2008, up from 12.5 million in 2003. Other segments will grow modestly.
In particular, the portable and home-based MP3 CD/MiniDisc player categories will be hurt by slowness in the overall markets for those devices and by falling prices for rival portable flash and jukebox devices.
Those falling prices, along with the increasing availability of music from legitimate online music providers, will drive demand for compressed audio players, IDC said.
Growth in the overall audio player market will provide "new opportunities" for chip vendors, device manufacturers and paid music service providers, IDC analyst Susan Kevorkian said in a statement.
Also aiding the growth will be the eagerness shown by companies to integrate compressed audio support as a secondary feature in a variety of digital devices, such as DVD players and game consoles. Recently, Hitachi released a new, leaner hard drive that is easy to integrate with consumer electronics devices.
Comments
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1. Frank Myers
A lot of high level fluff without depth of research data and methodologies used to project the numbers.
I guess IDC needs to sell it report.
What I'd like to see is the capacity per unit figures, sort of "barrel of oil" or 8 oz bottle case equivalent in the pop industry. If a 256Mg flash player holds say 64 songs then one 40gig iPod is equivalent to 156 flash players.
Furthermore, out of all those flash player buyers, who will or can afford to buy more music? In terms of song buyer "capacity" per player, the kind of player yield vastly different song purchase intentions. In the airline industry analysts talk about "Revenue Passenger Miles" (# of seats time miles flown) so we could dub this song buying capacity "Download Song Revenue" (# of songs/meg times megs). On an extreme basis this means a 256 mg flash buyer would have the potential to buy $64 of songs vs. the 40 gig iPod or iRiver owner who *could* buy $10,000 of songs.
In reality the guy who owns a 256 flash player will just transfer songs more frequently while the iPod guy will just keep *all* songs on the iPod. On an intuitive basis I'd think the guy who can afford an iPod for $400 can afford to buy more songs than the guy who spends less for a flash player.
2. Martin Taylor
IDC's estimate of a $58bn market in 2008 is not credible, based on unit shipments of only 55M. For the IDC estimate to be accurate, the ASP per device would approx. $1000. NO WAY.