According to recent research by, appropriately enough, Jupiter Research, most users of Apple’s iPod prefer to avoid the company’s first party music download service.

According to the research, most iPod users only have up to 20 tracks bought from Apple’s officially approved music download service. That puts Apple’s total sales per iPod through its digital music provider equate to about $20 per person… which is less admirable than the number of people using iTunes to transfer music to their devices would seem.

Using these figures, Jupiter Research estimates that only 5% of the music collectively stored on all iPods has been bought in online stores, let alone iTunes specifically. While it’s perfectly legal to rip a bought audio disk to another form of storage (in this case, an iPod), it’s interesting to see that despite being seen as the driving force behind digital content Apple is actually pushing up sales of physical media… which raises all kinds of iTunes adoption questions.

The report also says that fully 83% of iPod users simply never buy digital music, while the remaining 17% do buy music online, many don’t do so in any great volume. Of the 17% who do purchase songs online, it is usually a single song, about once a month.

The real question now is, if the ubiquity of Apple’s pod and relative inexpense of music sales can’t turn the world to digital distribution of music… what can?