The Great Debate UK

Can anyone stop the dominance of iTunes?

**Tom Dunmore is Editor-in-Chief of Stuff magazine. The views expressed are his own.**

Amazon’s music download service has finally arrived in the UK. That’s great news for music fans, who will benefit from lower prices and greater choice – but it’s not going to save the music industry from the dominance of iTunes.

After all, Amazon’s download service has been running for a year in America, but it’s still way behind iTunes. In fact, even if you add all of Amazon’s CD sales into the mix, iTunes is still bigger.

Here in the UK, iTunes has well over 50 percent of the music download market (some put the figure as high as 80 percent). And that’s despite Amazon’s biggest online rival Play.com selling MP3 music at knockdown prices for the past six months. Why? Because neither Play.com nor Amazon can match Apple’s integration of iTunes software and iPod hardware.