Apple's growing slice of the music business – in pie charts
Source: NPD Group
The NPD Group on Tuesday issued what at first appears to be a pair of contradictory facts:
- Apple (AAPL) now controls the largest share of the music business, its iTunes Store accounting for 25% of unit sales in the first half of 2009, up from 14% in 2007.
- Compact discs are still the most popular format for paid music, accounting for 65% of unit sales.
How can this be? The trick is that Apple controls the lion's share — 69% — of paid downloads, whereas CD sales are spread out among many players, chief among them Wal-Mart (WMT), Best Buy (BBY), Amazon (AMZN) and Target (TGT).
To see better how this works, let's put the data into pie charts:
Source: NPD Group
Source: NPD Group
Source: NPD Group
Not covered in the NPD report, of course, is music piracy, which according to a recent U.K. report accounts for roughly 18% of music downloads — which would put it ahead of Amazon but well behind iTunes.
Sorry, but the data is not very clearly presented.
What is the "unit" when you say "unit sales"?
Downloads are mostly single songs purchases while CDs are basically a bundle of ~12 songs.
Are units sales in downloads just 1 song while its 1 CD when we talk about CD sales?
If so the charts aren't very insightful!
ex ped: I can't put my hands on it right now, but I remember reading somewhere that the unit in the study is the song, whether on a CD or a digital download.
Phillip,
It appears that something is wrong with these charts.
The charts show that Wal-mart has 20% of the Compact Disc sales and 0% of the Digital downloads, but still show 20% of the total market. How is this possible?
Additionally, the charts show that Amazon has only have 6.5% of the total market? How is this possible if they have 10% of the Compact Disc sales and 8% of the Digital downloads. ???
ex ped: Yikes! Great catch. I've revised the opening pie chart. I think I've got it right now.
If I may respectfully present the concept that pie charts are only designed and efficient at displaying an AB>CD relationship, and no other. The 3-D skew adds nothing to understanding, and actually hides some of the message.
I found the use of horizontal bar charts is a much clearer visualization of the relative 'shares', and a better use of space.
May I suggest that the information and knowledge found here: http://www.perceptualedge.com/ is chock full of resources to building better and more informative visual data.