Apple dominates the digital music market and, one could argue, it does so because it invented it, or to be more accurate, reinvented it. Technically, it was Napster that invented the digital distribution of music and Kazaa that later dominated it, once Napster had been felled by legal action. Neither of these companies enabled a commercial market for digital music, they just created a popular mechanism for copyright theft.

When the music industry failed to stop Kazaa by legal action, many commentators wondered whether the music industry was doomed to death by digital theft. Why would anyone ever pay for music over the Internet when it was so easy to steal it?

In April 2003, Apple began to provide the answer to that question, when it launched the iTunes store and sold a million songs in its first week of operation. Of course, music theft didn’t suddenly stop dead in its stolen tracks­it continued to continue, but Apple had demonstrated that a well designed Internet music store could be cool, convenient and financially viable. It may even turn out to be profitable. At the last count iTunes had sold upwards of 400 million tracks or, to look at it another way, about 18 tracks to everyone who bought an iPod.

More importantly, from Apple’s perspective, the iTunes store has become a promotional phenomenon in the music business. It can claim credit for the success of a number of groups, such as Rogue Wave and Postal Service, and is now regarded by some as more influential in the music business than MTV. This is why U2 partnered with Apple to launch its How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, album. Vertigo, one of the tracks from the album, became the soundtrack for an iPod advert and a special red and black U2-endorsed iPod went on sale.

The iTunes store is not yet providing music video downloads, but there can be little doubt that it will in time. Apple is on the verge of achieving something quite awesome – superseding the Sony Walkman with the iPod and, quite possibly, superseding MTV with iTunes. And, in case you’ve forgotten, Apple is really a computer company.

Luckily for Apple, success in the music business is breeding success in the computer business. It’s what Wall Street is referring to as the halo effect. According to a survey by Morgan Stanley (published in March) iPod users are converting from Windows to the Mac at the remarkable rate of 19% – just under one in five. That’s a hell of a halo, given that iPods are selling in the millions. It probably has a great deal to do with the seemingly seamless integration between the iTunes, iMac and iPod, which really is impressive, and it may also be connected with the fact that there is a cheap entry level Mac (the Mac mini), which doesn’t cost a whole lot more than a high-end iPod.

In any event, the Apple renaissance, that Apple fans have been praying for for so long, is clearly happening. But will Apple know how to ride the wave this time around?

Go to www.boingboing.net and take a look at the monthly stats. They change all the time (as they are updated regularly) and when I last looked they showed 38% of visitors to the BoingBoing web site were Firefox users, 34.9% Internet Explorer users and 10% Safari users (Safari is Apple’s browser). So is this telling us that Firefox has already become the dominant browser?

Well, probably not – but it is certainly dominant among visitors to BoingBoing and there is nothing that I can detect about the site that would give a statistical twist in favour of one browser rather than another. However, other sites tell a different story.

Stats from PCWorld,com, published on June 1st, suggest that Firefox was used by just over 20 percent of visitors while IE 6.0 was used by 66 percent. This site may mitigate in favour of IE users, but that’s by no means certain.

In any event, what these sites are reflecting is which browsers are actually used, not which browsers are loaded on PCs. In all probability Firefox users surf the web more frequently than IE users and thus they get counted more. Taking myself as an example, I use Firefox on a Windows PC and a Windows laptop, but I use Safari on my Apple. However, I have IE loaded on all three machines to access those sites where only IE works (like PlaceWare, for example). So how do I figure in the stats?

Well, I can be counted as 3 machines. All have IE loaded, two have Firefox loaded and one has Safari loaded, but actually I use Safari most of the time. When I don’t use Safari, I use Firefox and I use IE once every week at most. My rough guess is that I’m 80 percent Safari, 18 percent Firefox and 2 percent IE. So, in terms of web activity, you are most likely to catch me using Safari.

Perhaps this phenomenon explains the disparity you get when you examine stats provided by market research companies. WebSideStory, for example, currently presents a quite different market picture, giving Firefox just less than 7 percent market share. Its statistics show Firefox having grown by 66 percent since December 2004 in terms of market share from around 4 percent. The company also highlights the fact that there are significant geographical differences, with Firefox having about a 22 percent share of the German market, but only 3 percent in Japan. Another company, OneStat.com, give Firefox an 8.45 percent share (figures are from March 2005). These figures may reflect the percentage of PCs that have Firefox loaded, but who knows?

All Windows PCs, and Apple PCs too, are shipped with IE loaded. IE is, in fact, fully embedded in Windows. Microsoft wasn’t actually lying when it maintained in its antitrust case that IE was an integral part of Windows. Technically it is. Indeed it would be difficult to fully remove it from Windows and foolish to try.

Consequently, unless there is a dramatic rise in the number of Linux PCs sold, IE is always going to have around 50 percent market share, even if no-one ever uses it.

So, getting back to the question, which really is the dominant browser? I suspect that, by usage, it’s still IE, but judging by the continuing enthusiasm for Firefox, it won’t remain that way for long.