A music download (commonly referred to as a digital download) is the digital transfer of music via the Internet into a device capable of decoding and playing it, such as a personal computer, portable media player, MP3 player or smartphone. This term encompasses both legal downloads and downloads of copyrighted material without permission or legal payment. Music downloads are typically encoded with modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) audio data compression, particularly the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format used by iTunes as well as the MP3 audio coding format.[1]
According to a Nielsen report, downloadable music accounted for 55.9 percent of all music sales in the US in 2012.[nb 1][2] By the beginning of 2011, Apple's iTunes Store alone made US$1.1 billion of revenue in the first quarter of its fiscal year.[3] According to the RIAA, music downloads peaked at 43% of industry revenue in the US in 2012, and has since fallen to 3% in 2022.[4]
- ^ Hwang, Jenq-Neng (2009). Multimedia Networking: From Theory to Practice. Cambridge University Press. p. 50. ISBN 9780521882040.
- ^ Lunden, Ingrid (4 January 2013). "Download Me Maybe: U.S. Music Market Up By 3.1%, Fuelled By 1.3B Digital Track Sales In 2012, Says Nielsen". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 6 January 2013. Retrieved 21 January 2013.
- ^ Apple's iTunes revenues top $1.1 billion in Q1 Archived 12 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine, FierceMobileContent 19 January 2011
- ^ https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2022-Year-End-Music-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf [bare URL PDF]
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