I know that people think that I am a major Apple fanboy, but honestly I personally believe I’m not. I am sincerely concerned about the increase of Apple market share while they still promote their closed hardware model. I am glad to see a move from the Windows monopoly, but eventually any monopoly is a bad thing, even an Apple monopoly.

Still, I get pissed when people claim that Apple has a monopoly on online music sales. A new class action suit is right around the corner which to me is bullshit. Here are some facts against an Apple monopoly:

1. Wikipedia describes a monopoly to be “a persistent situation where there is only one provider of a product or service in a particular market. Monopolies are characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods”. First off this is not true for the entire music market, as iTunes does not sell in the offline market, which (yeah this is true) is still bigger. Considering the online market numbers are different with Apple having a share of over 80% of all online digital downloads., which brings us to point #2.
2. More than 80% might sound like a lot. 3 billion songs sold might sound like a lot. But research proved that only 21 songs were sold on average per sold iPod. In other words, the market is still huge and people are still filling up their music either with CD-ripped copies or illegally downloaded songs. Apple is just the first company that has been able to break the monopoly of illegal downloads and make it easy enough for people to even consider buying their music online.
3. Obviously fact #2 also proves that people have no problem finding content for their iPods. The fact is that any iPod will play any music available without DRM. As more and more record labels are making their content available without DRM, interoperability between music bought in different stores will become a non-issue.
4. The iTunes Music Store (iTMS) only sells DRM because the record labels demanded them too. In the pioneering times that Apple started iTMS this was necessary. As the record labels demanded Apple to be able to quickly patch any problems in the DRM might they occur, Apple decided to keep things manageable and not license their DRM method to others. Although this is still an issue, it is becoming less and less important because of fact #3.

All and all I don’t see what the monopoly of Apple’s music store is all about. The more and more DRM is being dropped, the easier it is to buy music in the iTMS and use it on whatever device you want. The same goes for music bought in another store and using it on your iPod. Furthermore people prove that the size of the market still leaves a big enough market share to be conquered, making this monopoly by Apple nothing more than a virtual monopoly.

Personally I would be more worried about Apple creating a monopoly in their operating system, fanatically bundling hardware with their OS and even shipping a lot of software with it (iLife). Obviously i don’t think this is an issue either, but this is a totally different story.