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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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Rise of Online Music Retail - Singapore

February 11, 2006

The Hitwise Online Performance Awards were held in Singapore for the first time on February 9, and at looking at the winners I was particularly interested in the Shopping and Classifieds - Music category. Soundbuzz took out this award for 2005, which was an acknowledgement of their significant contribution to the development of the online music industry.

To put this achievement in context, I decided to take a look at how the online music retail industry compared to visits to generic music websites during 2005, and found the below chart quite telling:

MusicSG.png

As you can see, users in 2005 increasingly visited music retail websites between January to December 2005. In contrast, the general Music category declined. This indicates that users were more willing to pay for music downloads, relative to their searches for free music ('free music downloads' was still a popular search term).

Soundbuzz also launched an Australian website in 2005, Ripit.com.au where users can pre-purchase vouchers from outlets such as DickSmith, 7Eleven, Woolworths and Big W. This retail strategy is effective in that it overcomes the barrier of credit card accessibility, particularly as music retail attracts a young demographic.

The entrance of Apple iTunes has already made a significant impact on the Singapore market. The latest weekly data (w/ending February 4, 2006) indicates that Apple iTunes was the leading website with 14.7% market share. Another significant player is MTV Shop which ranked 3rd with 5% market share.

Soundbuzz and MusicMatch which have been around much longer on the beat, have a highly competitive year ahead of them in 2006.

Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 07:32 PM | (1) | (0)

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Comments

Did you track http://www.soft.com.sg ? Quite a lively site for all thing related to music in Singapore.

Posted by James | June 16, 2006 02:18 PM

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Sandra Hanchard

Senior Analyst, Hitwise Asia Pacific.

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