The German Association for Information Management, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM) believes that this year Germans will download as much music onto their computers than never before. The number of downloads is expected to rise to probably 33 million single songs and albums which corresponds to almost 100.000 downloads each day. For 2007 BITKOM forecasts 60 millions of turnover generated by music downloads.
“The share of downloads in the entire music market will strongly rise over the next few years”, firmly believes Mr. Bernhard Rohleder, managing director of BITKOM. Currently this share is an one-digit percentage. “If copyright holders were really to renounce their copy rights on downloads, the year 2007 could usher in a completely new era in terms of selling music online”, continues Rohleder. Smaller copyright holding firms have already started to renounce their copy rights and now with EMI one of the heavy weights wants to waive their copy right for download music which could lead to turnovers going up strongly.
This would not be a surprise given that the success of the digital music market is due to the demand on the part of men. Only one in three music pieces is currently downloaded by women. About 45 percent of all purchasers of digital music are below the age of 30. The average age is 31 years. For comparison: for sound carriers such as CDs the average age of purchasers is currently 39 years. Thus, purchasers of digital music are on average eight years younger than the buyers of CDs. 