Are you above average in the size of your music collection? Relax - OK?

Michael Gartenberg | April 25, 2004, 05:28 PM

I have gotten a lot of mail on our release about the sweet spot of capacities for portable digital music players. Most of the issues centered around two points. "90% of consumers who maintain a music collection on their PC have no more than 1,000 songs in their collection and that 77% of consumers interested in purchasing a portable media player would want a portable music player with a capacity of 1,000 songs"

Most of the comments went along the lines of the reader who said "You guys are soooo wrong, I have 38gb of music files and most of my friends have at least that or more..." OK. That's fine. But please calm down, we're not wrong and you're clearly not average. In fact, only 5% of US online households even have an MP3 player, either flash or hard disk based. By the way, if you're a client and need a breakdown of the #s and demographics, give us a holler at inquiry@jupitermedia.com and we'll get them to you.

That's why we do research to explore what's beyond the borders of the technorati and determine what's actually out there. Add some analysis and you get some insight as to what will likely happen in the market place. Yes, you might have a larger music collection but that just puts you into the 10% minority. Interesting, the larger collections, although small in number, represented an interesting portion of the demographic and does explain why some folks buy 30-40GB players. As more folks get interested in video, and if video is ever done right, that will also drive higher capacities. For NOW, the bulk of the world has less than 1,000 songs and doesn't DESIRE more than 1,000 in capacity. That bodes very well for devices like the iPod mini. As music collections scale, so too will capacity and price points will continue to fall. This is a very important space for the industry that will just keep growing but please remember, right now it's a nascent market.