NPD Group: Microsoft Zune second most popular player after iPod

Market Research Company NPD Group has said that Microsoft has indeed made decent progress with their Zune player as it debuted at number 2 spot behind the market leaders Apple iPod.

It has managed to displace SanDisk as the second most popular digital music/video player in the market. It has won 9 percent of the U.S. market, measured by unit sales. It also managed to garner 13 percent of the dollar volume for the week ended Nov. 18.

Microsoft had launched the Zune player in the US market on November 14 and these are the statistics for the first couple of days of its launch.

The Apple iPod range of players continues to dominate the market and it represented 63 percent of unit sales and 72.5 percent of dollar volume. Ross Rubin, NPD’s director of industry analysis spoke about Zune: “This was especially impressive given the Zune’s single capacity configuration and relatively high price point. However, Apple still retained dominant share during the week and Zune was still outsold by PlaysForSure-compatible players in aggregate.”