European portable music player market continues strong growth
A recent report confirms the continued growth of the MP3 player in Western Europe, which is apparently the world’s largest market.
Ready for some statistics?
In 2005 sales of MP3 players witnessed massive growth of 241%, with 32m units sold, and will stay ahead of the rest of the world until at least 2010. MP3 players and Sony’s PMP were the hottest selling personal electronic devices in 2005, representing 61% and 20% respectively of a market worth €4.7Bn in Western Europe alone.
Flash-based players are particularly popular now that they compete favourably in price with hard disc based players above 4Gb. They are expected to rise in capacity to 30Gb by the year 2010, though hard drive players will reach over 200Gb, and so will be most popular for players that show video.
Mobile phones sporting music playback are predicted to take market share from entry-level MP3 players. It’ll be interesting to see how an iPhone will fare.
So there you go – we all like portable music players, and not just the iPod.
