End of the iPod? You must be joking!

Stephen Withers
Friday, 18 September 2009 11:32

Opinion and Analysis

Mark Twain said "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." If iPods could talk for themselves, they'd probably be saying much the same thing.

Be warned: this is one of my occasional bag-a-colleague rants. But perhaps the subeditors are more to blame this time for the linkbait headline.

An article by Charles Arthur originating in The Guardian and republished by affiliated papers (eg The Age) is headlined "End of the iPod era", and opens "Sales of Apple's music player are heading for a long-term decline that could affect digital music downloads."

Nonsense!

That draws a false distinction between what we might call 'traditional' iPods and newer members of the family, specifically the iPod touch and the iPhones.

Apple sold 10.2 million iPods and 5.2 million iPhones during its 2009 third quarter. That's a total of 15.4 million units.

In the second quarter, it was 11.01 million iPods and 3.79 iPhones, or 14.8 million units.

Going further back, the quarterly totals were 27.08 million, 17.94 million,  11.72 million, 12.34 million, and 24.43 million.

Given the strong seasonality of iPhone sales, it's not obvious that growth is over, even though the most recent numbers were on the low side. But they relate to a period prior to the declaration that the GFC was over.

So while Arthur is quite possibly correct in suggesting that the days of the dedicated music/video player are passing, that's very different from claiming the "end of the iPod era".

So what about the supposed impact on music sales? See page 2.