With all the main digital music companies busy increasing the capacity of their MP3 players, a new survey by WebTV Europe suggests that the average music fan makes regular use of just
2% of the tracks they have stored on their portable device.
The survey suggests that while consumers buy the big capacity players they frequently don't get anywhere near to filling them, and when they do they rarely listen to the vast majority of the tracks they own.
This leads some to question the need for such high capacity MP3 players
- pointing to the success of cheaper lower-capacity players like the iPod Mini, and flash based players like the iPod Shuffle and those made by Creative and iRiver. That news will be welcomed by the mobile industry who are busy adding MP3 player functionality to their phones but who are a long way off being able to deliver the kind of capacity that an iPod offers.
However, others argue there is still a place for high capacity players on the market. They argue that anyone with a large music collection generally only listens to a tiny part of that collection on a regular basis, but that they want to know they have access to a much wider music library should they want it.