You’ve heard the saying “lies, damn lies and statistics” – well that’s been Apple’s experience this week as two leading research companies published contradictory reports about whether online music sales at iTunes, Apple’s online music store, were actually growing or declining.

First Forrester research published a report that suggested that iTunes had experienced a massive slump. For the report Forester studied 2,791 credit and debit cards transactions in the US, and found that there had been a monthly revenue slump of 65% during January to June 2006. By contrast, it had found that iTunes had experienced a 700% increase in transactions from April 2004 to January 2006, with the transaction size growing from US$3.55 to US$6.69.

“It is too soon to tell if this decline was seasonal or if buyers were reaching their saturation level for digital music,” Forrester said in its report.

But now research company Piper Jaffray has just released another report where it says that sales at iTunes had actually risen 78% in the first nine months of 2006 compared to the same period last year. Piper Jaffray based its analysis on Apple’s company data.

What’s the truth? Well, only Apple knows for sure, so far all they’ve done is to issue a statement saying that Forrester’s assertions are incorrect – as you would expect.

Whichever statistics are right (and who knows maybe both are wrong), the fact remains that Apple’s iPod is a phenomenal success, and that iTunes has been an integral part of that success. Even if there has been a slump, which I doubt, Apple is still way out in front.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 2:15 pm under Apple, Technology.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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