Windows iTunes Sells A Million Songs In 3.5 Days 1007
ajkst1 writes "According to an Apple press release, the iTunes Music Store has sold 1 million songs since its release on the Windows platform on October 16. Also of note is the 1 million downloads of the iTunes music program itself. When the iTMS was first released, it took a full week to sell a million songs. The store has now had 14 million songs purchased and downloaded since its original launch in April."
go apple! (Score:5, Interesting)
sales figures (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Run DMC (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless Apple decides to make radical changes to their service model, a Windows-based version of iTunes will still remain a closed system, where iPod owners cannot access content from other services. Additionally, users of iTunes are limited to music from Apple's Music Store. As I mentioned earlier, this is a drawback for Windows users, who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, and choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device," said Fester. David, that is.
So, Windows users expect choice in music etc more than others ?
I don't really like it (yet) (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think saving $2 on an album is that great of a bargain when the compression is lossy and you factor in the cost of disc and jewel case.
Quicktime and iTunesHelper are both loaded at computer startup and happily sit in the background, guzzling memory (iTunesHelper is 3 MB, for example). Does this crap really need to run when I'm not using it?
Arbitrary restrictions on burning a playlist (10 burns, then you have to mess with it to burn more) seems a bit silly.
That said, I do like the store browsing, and getting 30sec of good quality samples on the music is pretty nice, although I'd prefer full song at low quality (might be a problem with Audiobooks, but they've proven they can differentiate the two.)
At this point, I'm going to stick with buying used and ripping the stuff into Windows Media Player. The interface is better, it doesn't automatically suck memory when I'm not using it, and the visualization runs at more than 3fps.
Did you catch the patent? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yet another worthless, obvious patent. Sigh.
Rock On! And A Question For The Community... (Score:5, Interesting)
Once I get my finances situated, I'm off to download iTunes and get started. It's about time that someone realized that yes, there is in fact a good online music business model.
Now, how to go about getting them to sell my band's music on the store? Since we don't have a label, the split of sales would be a bit different, I'd assume there would have to be a different deal structure worked out. Does anyone else here on
looks good so far... (Score:2, Interesting)
only wish they would break the country boundary (yes I know that's not easy)
Busy. (Score:3, Interesting)
The success of this sales model (Score:5, Interesting)
Perfect for One Hit Wonders (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to rip all my cd's and then go on gnutella to grab the few tracks that I don't own but listen to all the time, or single songs from artists who I generally dislike (i.e. Lose Yourself by Eminem) - now I just buy those songs for 99cents from iTMS, avoiding the "must buy a full cd" syndrome that always stopped me before, and suddenly I own every song on my computer for just a few bucks.
In fact, the iTMS taught me something that I hopey the RIAA will learn one of these days: Good Karma is fun.
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:3, Interesting)
Right on:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:2, Interesting)
Dude, your remark should make Roxio, Real, and Buy.com shake with fear. They are the ones with the dot-com era business plan.
For Apple, iTunes Win is merely trojan for three Apple-invented technologies: Quicktime, Rendesvouz (actually and open source standard), and Fair Play.
Look at this as an innovative marketing campaign. It is clear that Apple is not getting rich out of Music sales (at least not until they reach 1 billion in annual sales).
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:3, Interesting)
burning to cd (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:go apple! (Score:5, Interesting)
itms offers indie labels... does a rather good job too - at least according to cd baby. source is here:
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=2221 [insanely-great.com]
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:4, Interesting)
Easy to access previews. A friend of mine recommended a band to me. Since I just downloaded iTunes, I pulled up there album and listen to a few songs. It's only 30 seconds, but it was quicker than finding a full song on Kazaa and hoping that the song on Kazaa is properly labeled.
Not only that but this propreitary service only lets you play your songs on an Ipod, no third party players supported.
You can also burn to CD, enabling you to use any Discman or other portable CD player.
grrr! (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, folks, Linux on the desktop is obscure.
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:3, Interesting)
While not a landslide for a company like Apple, it is still respectable and probably takes care of the overhead.
Where apple makes a killing is on the sales of the ipod music player. Expect sales of these to go through the roof now that there is a windows client (especially with Christmas around the corner) and it's not unreasonable to expect them to sell 3 million a year.
If Apple were to only make $34 profit a unit, that would mean an additional $100 million a year profit.
Add to this the untangible values gained from increased brand recognition and respect (leading to increased Mac sales), which in turn leads to a steadily increasing stock price [yahoo.com], it is indeed easy to see that there is lots of sales and profit.
Congratulations Steve, you have once again shown your cunning.
Quality is my biggest issues (Score:2, Interesting)
I much prefer Magnatune [magnatune.com]("we are not evil") who allows you to download wav and lossless
My second problem is that my tastes are rather eclectic, and using iTunes to find albums to my taste hasn't been working. For instance, I'll pick an album that I really like, and look at the "people who buy this album also buy" and discover I don't like any of their suggestions. But I don't buy much popular music, so it may work for other people.
Related, the 30-second browsing is often not enough for me. Supposedly the new Napster per-song service will allow you to preview the whole song. I know that I bought some Magnatune album recently because I could browse the whole album.
-- Herder of Cats
Re:Rock On! And A Question For The Community... (Score:2, Interesting)
I want to see a big company take the chance and deal directly with the artists instead of the RIAA. "Hey, I'll pay you 25%, instead of the RIAA's 2%. That sound good with you?"
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:5, Interesting)
On National Public Radio a representative from Apple was talking about the fee structure. 99 cents per song is distributed thusly:
- 80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
- 19 cents is split between the artist and Apple.
And yet they keep quoting the 10 Million Downloads In the first 3 months statistic and now the 1,000,000 song statistic. This means that for those 1 million songs the record companies made $800,000 and that the artist and Apple have to share $190,000.So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing. Of course Apple has to promote the iPod, they have to pay for the software development, the bandwidth, the data storage etc and they have to split their share with the artist (who once again seem to be considered a line item expense rather than the people who produce the art and product)
Don't fool youself into thinking this is supporting the artist. The record companies are just as corrupt as ever.
Re:Is it for me? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't mean to troll, but (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Downloaded iTunes for the AudioBooks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:3, Interesting)
What a dumbass (Score:5, Interesting)
Anybody remember when Jack Valenti said this:
Permission to be smug, sir!
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One million..... not that much (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:go apple! (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how many corporations are still blocking the napster.com domain, and what effect that's happening on their business?
Re:I don't really like it (yet) (Score:3, Interesting)
So it's likely that Apple will release faster/smaller versions for Windows with time.
Re:Wrong! (Score:3, Interesting)
Patience.
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:3, Interesting)
The nice thing, hopefully, about the iTunes Music Store is that once it stops being an active profit-bringer because of the iPods, it still is at least breaking even. So Apple isn't really paying any money for it to run. It's just kind of self-sufficient.
Moreover, even if they don't make any money from it, the iTunes Music Store does good things for apple. It engenders some kind of goodwill, it makes some people who might otherwise write Apple off take them seriously enough as a still-vital company they might look at some of Apple's hardware offerings, it gives Apple something they can point at and say "look at all the revenue passing through the Music Store every month, we're not going anywhere anytime soon".
Perhaps most importantly though if iTunes is adopted in a big way it makes a big logjam on the spread of Windows Media. If someone really loves iTunes, even if they don't like the iPod they'll be more likely to buy an mp3 player than a wmv player. If nothing else, this means that once wma starts trying to take off, people will actually go "wait, this DRM is really stupid" since they've dealt with what is, purely relatively speaking, a more reasonable DRM system (iTunes).
Also, iTunes is a sneakily brilliant and possibly unintentional way of making absolutely certain that almost everyone has a non-Microsoft way of viewing MPEG4s. WMV vs. MPEG4 is likely going to erupt into a rather painful war at some point, and this is MPEG4's big beachhead... how many music players do you think will add AAC as a result of the iTunes store? Maybe not many, but certainly more than there would have been otherwise..
Re:Is it for me? (Score:2, Interesting)
These "intelligently lossy" codecs should be able to be transcoded infinite times without any loss in quality, assuming they had the same definition of "losable data."
I'd like to be educated - it seems like it should be possible with an intelligent codec, yet I've never seen one.
Re:Is it for me? (Score:2, Interesting)
If Microsoft isn't even supporting them why should Apple? Let's be real here.
Re:Lot's of sales... No profit... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now call me crazy but somehow I think it costs the labels who buy their discs in millions a wee bit less to do it, add power bills and salaries for employee's etc (although this could and should be a damn near fully automated process, 3 employees and a shipping crew could do everything to produce the discs for thousands of artists in a week), and let's say that cuts the margin to more like $0.20/disc for them. Now they sell them for $15-20 a cd. Somehow I don't think cd production is their biggest problem, and it's not like they have to look for retailers/distributors either.
Sad though, add the artist's $0.15 to that and it costs the studio $0.15 since the artist is charged for the production costs... most likely charged $0.35/cd, so make it $0 for the studio to produce cd's. Hmmm... I really don't see how the studios care about this one way or the other