Apple getting just four per cent of iTunes bounty

The online music boom is to become the next dot-com bust, according to new figures, with record labels taking the vast majority of the profits from the burgeoning industry.

Only four per cent of the money made from selling music online ever goes to the song shop owner, statistics obtained by the The Independent show, with the record labels making a far greater share of the cash than they ever did with traditional formats like CDs.

For every song sold via Apple's iTunes which costs 99¢, says The Independent, Jobs and friends get 4¢, music publishers get 8¢ and copyright holders - that's record labels more often than not - get a hefty sum: a whopping 62¢.

Apple never claimed it was likely to get rich off iTunes - it launched the service to promote sales of its money-spinning iPod, which certainly worked, as millions them have flown off the shelves since launch and snagged the company around 70 per cent of the market in digital music players.

Unsurprisingly, though, for download sites that don't tie users to a particular music player, such as Apple, or don't have a big corporate coffers, such as Coke's download offshoot, MyCokeMusic, it's a pretty unprofitable business.

And that could mean, like the dot-com boom and bust before it, that the recent spate of bandwagon-chasers could end up shutting their virtual doors before too long.