Zune Slips To #5 As Player Wars Heat Up

Zune slipped to 5th place in the race for portable player sales in the all important shopping week after Thanksgiving. It’s not good news for Microsoft and comes after deep price cuts as well as the start of a major advertising push by the rival SanDisk Rhapsody
combination.

But Microsoft may be planning a long term comeback by offering improved wireless song swapping and a new points system that would reward song swapping that leads to purchase. The iPod remains the dominate player with a 75% market share and a new Jupiter study shows once again that Apple is almost single handedly driving the entire download industry.

More: Bloomberg, Paid Content