MacRumors said:
@charlieegan3:Less easy for people to pirate apps I guess.
Songs, NOT apps.
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Apple Announces 25 Billion Songs Sold in iTunes Music Store
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Songs, NOT apps.
I've only bought a handful of songs / albums from iTunes. I really like buying from Amazon's digital store because:
-MP3 (no DRM)
-Frequent sales.
The last few albums I bought were $5.99, for good, modern stuff. Nice.
-MP3 (no DRM)
-Frequent sales.
The last few albums I bought were $5.99, for good, modern stuff. Nice.
I find it odd that they didnt publicise it - Last time, when it was 10 billion or whatever, Apple splashed it all across their home page, with the countdown clock and all.
"Phillip will receive a €10,000 iTunes® Gift Card."
That's going to just wreck Zynga's leaderboards.
I like having the Amazon option, but Apple's choice of MP4 (AAC) format gives better quality and also has NO DRM. At the dawn of the iTunes Store the music labels required DRM (Fairplay) and iTunes video still has it. But Apple fought for DRM-free music and ultimately we got it.
That's going to just wreck Zynga's leaderboards.
I like having the Amazon option, but Apple's choice of MP4 (AAC) format gives better quality and also has NO DRM. At the dawn of the iTunes Store the music labels required DRM (Fairplay) and iTunes video still has it. But Apple fought for DRM-free music and ultimately we got it.
Your numbers are a bit off, but your conclusion is spot-on. The iTunes Music Store launched on 28 April 2003, so it has been open for almost, but not quite, 10 years now.
I've been tracking Apple's milestone announcements since the store launched (don't ask me why, I really don't know). Overall they've sold 7 million songs per day since launch, which is up from the 5.84 million per day as of Sept 2012 (when they reached 20 billion). The recent pace, though, has really accelerated. They've sold 34 million songs per day since last Sept's announcement. Before that, the pace was 10-11 million per day.
See the included screenshot of my nerdtastic spreadsheet.
Attachments
About 13 months ago the iTunes Store opened for all Latin America an almost all the Caribbean. In the summer more iTunes Stores opened in selected countries. Then in September another number of stores opened mainly in Asia. There's your answer.
Buying from Amazon because of DRM free mp3 format is stupid, when you can buy higher quality DRM free AAC format from the iTunes store.
And at least in the UK, anyone who is a bit organised has a permanent iTunes sale, because you can always find some store selling £25 iTunes gift cards for £20. That's 20 percent off everything.
Although music is available for free via many online sources, I think that with the shutdown of Limewire people just find it so much easier to just purchase their music. That's how I feel anyway. It's too much work to download music, sort it, find the album artwork, and fill in all the other data I'm OCD about. Plus the addition of iCloud sealed the deal for me. I often find myself frustrated that I don't have that sense of "automatic backup" with mixtapes or songs I download from Soundcloud that the producer or artist releases for free. My best solution is to put a "downloaded" comment in songs I don't purchase so I can sort by comments and back just those songs up.
I really hate when people say that MP3 is worse quality than AAC. At high bitrates (256+) you really cannot tell the difference when listening to a MP3 vs AAC file.
Even with iTunes GC sales, iTunes music is still quite a bit more expensive. Amazon MP3 is great.
Billions and Billions Served
You can tell that this is high quality stuff by the numbers involved. Nobody can serve Billions and Billions unless the product is top quality.
The sound quality of iTunes MP3s exceeds all other sources of audio - the people have voted with their pocketbooks.
You can tell that this is high quality stuff by the numbers involved. Nobody can serve Billions and Billions unless the product is top quality.
The sound quality of iTunes MP3s exceeds all other sources of audio - the people have voted with their pocketbooks.
I'm not convinced that you have enough data points to make those sorts of conclusions. Both of the facts you cite could be true, and it could still be true that sales are not accelerating. Indeed, over relevant time periods, they could be decelerating, flat, or even falling.
I don't know the reality, but data from 5 months ago and now is too little data to identify any trends whatsoever.
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What format do you buy the music in?
Thank Steve for saving the music industry. It was getting to a point 10 years ago that artists were only making money from concerts if they were well know enough to draw a crowd. Pirates were turning off a lot of good talent because is was near impossible to make it a new artist. People simply didn't want to pay a fortune for a CD.
Setting a compromise price much lower than paying for a hard copy CD did the trick. Users no longer had to pay 50% of the purchase price to Target or Walmart, plus the 40% to the CD manufacturers and distributors. Apple does it all for them for only 30%, leaving 70% instead of 10% for the producers and artists. Price per song is less, but the artists and producers still make a lot more. Everyone wins (except Walmart & Target, but I think they're doing OK anyway).
Setting a compromise price much lower than paying for a hard copy CD did the trick. Users no longer had to pay 50% of the purchase price to Target or Walmart, plus the 40% to the CD manufacturers and distributors. Apple does it all for them for only 30%, leaving 70% instead of 10% for the producers and artists. Price per song is less, but the artists and producers still make a lot more. Everyone wins (except Walmart & Target, but I think they're doing OK anyway).
There is no DRM, and for similar bitrates, AAC is better sounding than MP3 (which ain't saying much).
BUT:
SO:
Screw Apple. Screw the iStore.
I will not buy mediocre sounding files that are infested with unwelcome personally identifying information. I see no reason to use anything but FLAC at this point.
MP3 quality exceeds WAV or AIFF? Please justify your comment. How can a compressed file sound better than an uncompressed file?
Yes. I read about that in my little Austrian newspaper. 10,000 for the iTunes user and 100,000 for the monkeys.
