According to sources close to the talks, it appears the U.S. Justice Department has been looking into whether Apple “unfairly dominates” the digital music market with its popular iTunes store.
The sources say the Justice Department has been contacting music labels and other digital music providers, asking broad questions about the nature of the market in general, and Apple’s role in it.
The new inquiries may have been stemmed by accusations in March that Apple was using its giant market share lead to prevent rival Amazon MP3 from debuting new songs exclusively before they hit iTunes a day or two later.
The iTunes store currently has about 70 percent market share, with Amazon trailing at around 9 percent.
Global music sales have fallen from $26.5 billion at the start of the decade to just $17 billion last year, even as digital music sales have exploded.
Result for: digital music sales
According to sources close to the talks, it appears the U.S. Justice Department has been looking into whether Apple “unfairly dominates” the digital music market with its popular iTunes store.
The sources say the Justice Department has been contacting music labels and other digital music providers, asking broad questions about the nature of the market in general, and Apple’s role in it.
The new inquiries may have been stemmed by accusations in March that Apple was using its giant market share lead to prevent rival Amazon MP3 from debuting new songs exclusively before they hit iTunes a day or two later.
The iTunes store currently has about 70 percent market share, with Amazon trailing at around 9 percent.
Global music sales have fallen from $26.5 billion at the start of the decade to just $17 billion last year, even as digital music sales have exploded.
Result for: digital music sales
The creator of the extremely popular show American Idol, Simon Fuller, has seen his roster of artists hit a new iTunes milestone, 160 million songs downloaded.
Fuller’s artist management company 19 Entertainment said some of the more famous artists in the group are idol winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood and former and present British singers The Spice Girls and Annie Lennox.
“He is without question the biggest manager of the digital age,” says Fred Bronson, author of “The Billboard Book of Number One Hits.”
Fuller had teamed up with iTunes right at the start, in 2003 when legal digital music was still in its infancy. “I felt there was a real synergy with what I do, which is launching new artists and TV shows, and what iTunes does, which is to sell music in an immediate and interactive way,” Fuller added via Reuters.
Industry trade group IFPI says physical music sales (such as CDs) have fallen 12.7 percent year-on-year, while digital music sales continued to grow, 9.2 percent this year, and a 1000 percent gain since 2004.
Additionally, Fuller says: “The future is all about how the digital and the physical worlds can co-exist. I think music in the long term is going to be just fine. But in the short term, as we see, (it’s) bedlam and chaos. We have to reinvent, in music, TV and movies, that interaction between the consumer and the content we create.”
