NEWS 26.05.1999: Internet music sales will grow to almost £4bn by 2004 and could account for a quarter of all music sales by 2010, according to a report from Market Tracking International (MTI). The report claims European revenues will account for one fifth of the total figure.
The report says the music industry has been taken by surprise by the success of online audio and MP3 technology in particular and has been forced to take the internet seriously.
According to MTI, direct downloading of music from the internet - which currently accounts for less than eight per cent of the web music trade - will become more and more popular and threaten to take music out of the control of major corporations such as Sony, Universal and EMI. "The record companies are being dragged along by the proliferation of the MP3," Simon Dyson, music markets analyst at MTI, said.
26.05.2004: Five years on and the online music market hasn't quite reached the heady heights the analysts hoped for but no one can deny there's been a real explosion in online music. Or at least online music providers.
Napster launched last week and Oxfam's bignoisemusic went live today. Coke is also pushing its own offering by giving away free downloads on cans of its fizzy pop and recently clocked up 700,000 visitors to its site.
Analysts now reckon that getting to the golden £4bn mark will take until at least the later years of the decade but while song-shopping may be a nice-to-have rather than a luxury for the market's players, it's certainly been a boon for tech.
Sales of Apple's iPods and mini-iPod music players have gone through the roof, largely on the back of its iTunes virtual music store. Nevertheless, with the illegal downloaders and the download shops' feeding frenzy almost inevitably leading to a price war, the online music market will have a struggle on its hands before it can realise the promised dot-com music boom.
