MUMBAI: A lot of places cater to digital music, but all of them are minions to iTunes.

Dediu, incorporating new numbers released from Apple yesterday, pegs iTunes music spending at $6.9 billion a year. Peoples, riffing off numbers provided by the music industry‘s international trade group, pegs total consumer spending on digital music at about $9.3 billion a year.

Apple owns about 75 per cent of the digital music market; leaving the rest for a group that includes subscription services like Pandora, Deezer, Rhapsody and assorted retailers like Amazon.

That domination shows you why the music labels are still very eager to see anyone and everyone compete with Apple, as long as they can pay up for advances/royalties.

Conversely, the fact that Apple no longer has the digital music market entirely to itself, as it used to at the beginning of the iPad era, shows why Apple is watching the advance of competitors like Spotify with a wary eye.

Apple doesn‘t worry about making money from digital music, but it does benefit from music‘s lock-in effects. Or at least it used to. The more that platform-agnostic rivals like Spotify grow, the weaker that lock gets is what experts view says.