When Amy Greer of Lafayette, Indiana, downloaded Faith Hill's 'Mississippi Girl' from Apple's iTunes over the weekend she probably didn't expect to get a 10,000-song gift certificate and ten iPods of her choosing bundled in with her 99 cents purchase, but such are the perks should you be fortunate enough to buy the 500 millionth download from the iTunes platform. Of course she also won front row tickets to an upcoming Coldplay concert, so it wasn't all good news for Amy.
But it is all good news for Apple, or so it would seem, with the landmark download purchase coming just days after the computer firm posted its highest quarterly profits in its history. With Apple now possessing an 80% share of the US download market it is increasingly hard to see how any of its newer competitors will ever get anywhere close without offering consumers something radically different (especially if we assume Napster and Real have the subscription model sewn up).
Of course, Apple have lost their market dominance before, and the incompatibility of the iPod with music bought from any download platform other than iTunes remains a problem which insiders at the company's competitors hope may prove to be the stumbling block that stops Apple from maintaining that kind of market share once downloading goes truly mainstream.
However, while it is Apple boss Steve Jobs' unwillingness to collaborate that is causing the incompatibility problem, to many consumers it is the other download platforms that are incompatible with the iPod, rather than the iPod which is incompatible with them. All of which means that it is hard to see iTunes' dominance of the download sector being threatened anytime soon - with no one seemingly pursuing the kind of 'big idea' which could do just that. Apple's competitors, assuming they haven't got that 'big idea' in a box somewhere, will just have to wait for Jobs to mess up big time and then stage their attack.