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Quite an interesting article on the Business section of the UK's Sunday Times.

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Focus: Taking a bite of Apple

Few cynics are as hardened as teenage cynics. Add the experience of growing up in Manhattan, and the “seen-it-all” attitude is delivered with even more scorn.

Music-mad Simon loves American hardcore, Jamaican ska and punk. His computer hard-drive is full of songs, most of them illegally downloaded from websites. What the tech-savvy 15-year-old doesn’t have is an iPod — or any intention of getting one.

“I’m out actually doing stuff, talking to my friends. They don’t have iPods either,” said Simon. “What do I need an iPod for? All those ageing hipsters with those telltale white headphones poking out of their ears are sad.”

Apple Computer’s wildly successful iPod dominates digital music in a way that Sony’s tape-playing Walkman could have only dreamt about. As a result, Apple’s iTunes music store has become the leading music retailer on the internet.

But five years after its launch, the iPod is starting to lose its sheen. According to Zandl Group, a New York-based trend forecaster, the iPod backlash has begun. Zandl conducts regular surveys of 2,000 youngsters aged 8 to 24 on a variety of topics including music tastes, clothes and techno products.

For the first time last month, the iPod started attracting a statistically significant amount of negative comments.
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The article goes on to talk about how the younger you go, the less people care for iPods, how Spiral Frog may be a flawed concept before it's even launched, how Microsoft is stepping in via Zune, frustrated that other hardware manufactures can't dislodge the iPod, and how everybody is trying to do something in music, from MTV's new Urge store, to Amazon's current negotiations with the major labels.