Ipsos’ TEMPO Digital Music Brandscape study shows improvements in brands have been made by iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon.com while Napster, MySpace, Wal-Mart and Yahoo have experienced brand erosion over the last year (press release).

A survey of 1,148 Internet users in the summer of 2008 revealed 58% of people believe iTunes is the top fee-based digital music service or download store. That is an increase from 51% last year. Rhapsody improved to 7% from 4% while Amazon.com got 9% of votes (it did not sell MP3s in the summer of 2007). (Here's the PDF with the numbers.)

Napster got 8% (down from 10%), MySpace got 4% (down from 5%), Wal-Mart got 4% (down from 6%) and Yahoo got 2% (down from 4%). Other stores/services got 9% (down from 20%).

In terms of brand awareness (here's that PDF), iTunes 39% unaided awareness was far ahead from the next best service, Napster with 13% unaided awareness. Awareness figures came from a sample of 1,249 U.S. downloaders.

The statistics offer evidence of some services' success and show the difficulties faced by the less well known brands. eMusic is a good case in point. While eMusic is one of the more successful download services, it is not well known outside a core group of users. Few people surveyed think it is the best service and is ranks low in unaided (2%) and aided (20%) awareness. Similarly, a new service like last.fm is hailed as an innovative trailblazer but faces incredibly low unaided (0%) and aided (6%) awareness. The company, purchased by CBS for $280 million, must be mainstream to be considered a success. It has a long way to go.

One thing that stands out is the amount of services/stores that were considered to be the best. This year the "others" category was 9%, a big drop from 20% last year. The implication? The competitive music service/store market is increasingly marked by clear winners and losers. Mainstream users may not have room for more than a handful of services and the competition for the top few spots on the ladder should increase in the coming years. At the same time, the competition will act as a weeding out process. I can't imagine some of today's services being around in three years.