"MP3 is still the overwhelming favorite of file traders, but the once-universal format's popularity has been going quietly but steadily down in personal music collections for the last year. According to researchers at The NPD Group's MusicWatch Digital who track the contents of people's hard drives, the percentage of MP3-formatted songs in digital-music collections has slid steadily in recent months, down to about 72 percent of people's collections from about 82 percent a year ago," says CNet.
"People are still getting MP3s and putting them on hard drives but are deleting them at a rate faster than they're acquiring them," said Isaac Josephson, a researcher at NPD MusicWatch Digital. "People tend to think that downloads are more disposable than rips (copies from a CD), and currently, the lion's share (of MP3s) are downloads."
Later it says:
"NPD researchers estimate that there was a net loss of about 742 million MP3 files from US hard drives between August 2003 and July 2004, despite people acquiring billions of songs from file-trading networks and their own CDs. By contrast, Windows Media files showed a net gain of 537 million files on US hard drives, Josephson said."
The current score, according to the pie chart with the story, is
MP3 -- 72% WMA -- 19.6% AAC -- 4.3% * Other -- 3.9%
* includes both rips and downloads from Apple's music store.
It's accepted that many consumers neither know nor care which format they are actully using.
