iTMS Moving Up The Sales Charts

Kyusaku Natsume writes "According to the NPD Group, Apple's iTunes Music Store has sold more music than Tower Records and Borders in the U.S., based on sales and download figures for July, August, and September." From the article: "At seventh equal in the chart was iTunes, up seven places on the same period last year. Both Tower Records and Borders slipped a place to seven and nine respectively. Russ Crupnick, music and movies industry analyst for NPD, said he would not be surprised if iTunes was to continue to climb the charts, especially in the run-up to Christmas when iPods are high on many present lists."

The run-up to Christmas?

[KingSkippus]

he would not be surprised if iTunes was to continue to climb the charts, especially in the run-up to Christmas when iPods are high are many present lists.

The run-up to Christmas? Wouldn't it be more likely that it will climb after Christmas, after said iPods are opened and starting to be used?

Take the long view

[gobbo]

All the manoevering you're seeing and hearing from competitors, FUD and disinfo and legitimate complaints, is because the people in the middle of this new-take-on-an-old-market have the long view.

The next retail high-season, pshaw. Think twelve years from now. Apple competitors in the media-hub-style emerging markets have puckered anuses. Meanwhile it's full steam ahead towards full vertical integration at Apple.

It's an old saw by now, but since Sony isn't there already (and they could've been, nearly), Jobs is willing to play that role. This will probably be a good thing for operating systems, as an aside.

new business practises

[know1]

i have a friend whose band is on itunes, they are called yonni. they have no record deal at the moment, but recorded the songs in a studio themselves. maybe in the future companies like apple will replace traditional record companmies entirely. would be nice, no dirty executives and slimy contracts, just the musician and the record store, how it should be. watch record company executives everywhere get worried...

Hopefully everyone...

[Anonymous Coward]

...who has said "If someone can get something for free, they sure as hell won't buy it!" will shut up now. A large proportion of people - certainly enough to keep a business afloat - will pay for things by default, but get put off due to "value additions" such as draconian DRM or the general attitude from most media companies that all of their customers are thieves*. Apple has grasped that it is not necessarily cost that deters people from buying but inconvenience, and so by stream-lining the process of payment and delivery so that it is almost imperceptible - so, in fact, the customer can almost forget that they are "buying" anything at all! - they have managed to shore up such massive sales as to be an embarrassment to the RIAA. We see a similar thing with, of all things, mobile-phone ringtones - massive quantities are available online for free, but the fact that buying a ringtone is so much easier has led to this unfathomable market [if you had told me that such crappy "products" as ringtones would have been even mildly profitable a few years back, I'd have thought you were mad!] raking in billions per year.

* A recent example of this - I liked "Batman Begins" very much, and thought it was sufficiently well-written and directed that I'd like to reward the makers by buying a copy, even if it's not something I'm necessarily going to watch again enough to justify the purchase. Upon it's arrival, I opened the box and the first thing that fell out was not a nice, slick inlay, but a anti-piracy leaflet from piracyisacrime.com. Rolling my eyes, I placed the DVD into my player and settled down to watch the film, and what do I see? No slick animated menus, not even the boringly superfluous trailers for films I'm never going to watch, but a fucking commercial equating "piracy" with car-theft!. It looks like it was supposed to be unskippable, too, but thankfully my player does not have the "prevent the owner from skipping stuff he doesn't want to see" "value addition". The lunacy of this is astounding - it is as if PickleWorld(TM) created a huge, terrifying banner equating pickle-theft with murder to be placed in their stores, but instead of putting it over the side-exit or whichever mode of exit is usually employed by the serial pickle-thief, they put it over the checkout where it can only be seen by paying customers!

FUCK YOU PICKLEWORLD!

--SSJ

Re:Good news

[Rxke]

What if your CD is lost, or scratched? You expect to get a shiny new one at the store you bought it from?

well...

[know1]

although they may have drm at least they don't have rootkits. record company shot itself in the foot there. looks like the slow and drawn out death of the record companies is inevitable

Re:Good news

[Seumas]

An expense is incurred in reproducing a physical object. Not so in duplicating a downloadable MP3.

P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't one of these studies ever compare both sales and P2P traffic at once, rather than one group studying sales, another studying P2P, and the RIAA censoring it all as yet another group compiles it into one report..?

-JDS

Re:Good news

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but bandwidth may not be expensive, but it's not free either. It may be cheaper than furnishing a physical copy, but there is still a cost assosiated with each song download that they have to pay with the not-so-large portion of each 99c that they receive. Allowing customers to re-download missing files simply would not pay off in the end.

Re:Who cashes in?

[gobbo]

The music companies get about 68 cent, Apple 28,-. the artists 5,-

Margins, he said. After bandwidth, administration, credit card charges, server rooms, and development, I'm sure Apple doesn't have too much of that 28 cents left. However, even a 2 penny margin can add up if the numbers are right, and it's used strategically - *wink*.

Re:Good news

[vought]

Sure my old library was there but it was drmed and grayed out. I tried to remerge and set myself as teh new owner of the ipod since I tried all options. Itunes deleted about $400 worth of music and wiped my whole collection clean. :-(

Here's an article [about.com] that details the several options on each platform for solving exactly the problem you found yourself with.

You could argue that Apple should provide a "Restore from iPod" provision in iTunes, or a low-cost "Redownload all my shit" option, but wouldn't have just been easier to Google the answer to your $400.00 problem or to back up your system in the first place?

Complaining on Slashdot is easier that using Google, I guess.

Back up your data!

[Vandil X]

No, seriously.

If you do anything remotely important with your computer (entertainment included), then you should be doing regular back ups.

Restoring iTunes music and video files from a backup set of DVD-Rs or an external hard disk is almost effortless. If you value your electronic purchases (and other data) that much, you'll back it up.

Now as for being able to play your DRM'd files in 20 years, you might want to transcode or do like most people did when going from VHS to DVD: re-purchase in the new format.

Re:Good news

[Tim C]

Bandwidth costs would be easily offset against further sales

That is also quite a bold statement, given that you have no data for the likely number of repeat (no-cost) downloads. If the number is high enough, then no number of extra sales will cover it.

(Note that I'm not saying that that's *likely*, just that it's *possible*)

Re:Good news

[Tim C]

Yes - if you use google, you might find an answer to your problem and so actually have no excuse not to do something about it. Complaining on slashdot needs no follow-up action.

Re:Who cashes in?

[guet]

Somehow I get the feeling the record companies are the ones cashing in.

Apple cashes in now on ipods, and later on music when the record companies are obsolete.

They don't have to worry about margins on music just now so long as it's in profit and growing the market.

Re:Good news

[jacksonj04]

Re-downloads are, to be perfectly honest, a negligable cost. I pay my 79p (UK), download the track, and it stays on my hard-disk until something catastrophic happens (My HDD falls over or my system is stolen, for example). I may re-download it once or twice a year.

Napster does a good job of this. Purchases are stored centrally, and can be re-downloaded to any one of my three authorised machines. The major draw of Napster seems to be that the music is in fact streaming unless specifically downloaded, and the application is very closely tied with the service. A while back they increased the bitrate of all streams and downloaded files, and the application updated everything for me.

If iTunes offered that, maybe with an 'all you can eat' subscription (Again, Napster has one) then it would become an ideal music store for me. I don't give a damn about DRM to stop me copying the file, as long as I can get hold of my music anywhere.

Just a precursor

[bbzzdd]

Times are changing. People are no longer satisfied paying upwards to $20 USD for physical media which becomes more and more restrictive as time goes by.

The "free love" people tasted with P2P was a stake in the heart of the physical format. We can't go back to the way things were. People like iTunes because it sucks less than the alternatives. Sure, it's coated with DRM, but at least it's not installing rootkits on your PC.

Home recording, inexpensive marketing via the internet, and the digital media formats are the trifecta that will strip a lot of undeserving middle-aged record execs of their Diablos.

The music recording industry is fixing to implode, but what rises from the ashes could be very promising.

Re:Good news

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay my 79p (UK), download the track, and it stays on my hard-disk until something catastrophic happens (My HDD falls over or my system is stolen, for example). I may re-download it once or twice a year.

Man, if you're losing or destroying your hardware once or twice a year, you should really be backing up everything (not to mention being more careful with your system), not just depending on being able to re-download some purchased music files.