Online Music & Web 3.0 (Part 2)

Top Music Sites and Rankings

Among the online music portals, AOL Music has 15.66% market share (including Napster’s 2.6% market share) and more than 350,000 music subscribers to its credit. The site attracted 161,497,557 users in December 2006. AOL Music is the leading online music site with 25.2 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo! Music with 23.9 million unique visitors. AOL Music, originally known as thedj.com was founded in 1996.

AOL Music is followed by Yahoo! Music (14.8%), MTV Music (6.14%) and Rhapsody 4.67%. According to Nielsen//Net Ratings visitors go to Yahoo! Music more than twice as often as AOL Music and the average visit is significantly longer for Yahoo! Music at 36:15 minutes compared to 22:09 for AOL Music. Note, these are Online Music Subscription Services, and does not include Online Music Stores, which explains why iTunes is conspicuously absent. [Source: Nielsen//Net Ratings]

Ofcourse, in any discussion about Online Music, iTunes cannot possibly be absent. Acc. to comScore, the iTunes Store attracted 20.8 million unique visitors in November 2006, up 85 percent from November 2005. Apple’s iTunes digital jukebox software is downloaded 1 million times a day (June 2007 data) and has a user base of 500 million users, even though some of those users only download a few songs a year.

Apple today announced that more than three billion songs have been purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store. iTunes is the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store featuring a catalog of over five million songs, 550 television shows and 500 movies. iTunes recently surpassed Amazon and Target to become the third largest music retailer in the US.

New entrants and Innovators

The online music industry has been experiencing an explosion of community driven music sites, which not only plays music but also recommends popular music and allows users to network, share and discuss their music and views. In the last two to three years we have seen the emergence of sites like MOG.com, Last.fm, iLike and Pandora.

MOG.com is a music community site and its Mog-o-matic application, provides users with a personalized web page that displays their music collection and the artists, albums and songs they listen to. The service also connects them with others who share similar tastes.

DRM-free music download site Jamendo is offering half the ad revenue from its site to the registered artists. The site boasts of over 3 million albums downloads and over 500,000 unique visitors per month.

Pandora has 6.9 million registered listeners and it has redesigned its website to better integrate the listening and community features. iLike, a social network focused on music recommendations recently-launched iLike for Facebook, which signed up a million users in its first week of launch, then a million more in the next 5 days, and another million in the next 4 days.

(to be continued)

[Part 1]

This segment is part 2 in the series : Online Music & Web 3.0
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