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iTMS Downloads Surpass 300 Million
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Lacero said:
Eh, they've got a pretty extensive catalog, and while it needs to keep growing at the rate it is, it doesn't need to do more than that. Most of what they don't have wouldn't sell that many copies, anyway.
What I think they really need to do is become a better way to browse and discover music. They sell it perfectly, but other people can compete there pretty easily. If, though, they have really smart software that keeps track of everything you buy, everything you look at and don't buy, how long you look, etc. and do some good statistical analysis of this, they could become not a service for buying music, but for finding and suggesting music. Plus links with radio stations, online reviews, etc. and the fact that by being the market leader, they have so much more data available to them, and hence can give better recomendations....
That's how itms could really, really rock.
Republishing press releases
This is not news. It's an arbitrary number, and has little real news benefit. It's a press release. An article that looks at this stated number in relation to other music services, or how iTMS profits are becoming a larger part of Apple's profits would be different.
I come to MR to get the news that I can't get from the "Hot News" page on the apple site.
This is not news. It's an arbitrary number, and has little real news benefit. It's a press release. An article that looks at this stated number in relation to other music services, or how iTMS profits are becoming a larger part of Apple's profits would be different.
I come to MR to get the news that I can't get from the "Hot News" page on the apple site.
BlueDjinn said:This one doesn't include the "new country" dates, but does include the "average per day" numbers for each time period:
I got all of the numbers from Apple press releases except for the 13 million and 230 million figures, which were announced by Jobs at the iTMS for Windows launch and this years' MWSF keynote respectively.
Note that there actually has been a slight dip in the rate since January, but it's actually the other way around--the first few weeks of January had a brief *spike* while thousands of gift certificates were traded in, new iPod recipients went nuts with their new toys, and so forth.
At the current rate, they should hit 375 million by the 2-yr. anniversary (April 28, 2005) and around 700 million by years' end...but they could indeed break 1 billion if the rate keeps ramping up...
crap, I guess I misread the graph before this. ignore that post. I thought the number of songs sold per day had increased, but the rate of that increase had slowed down. But a net drop in number of songs sold per day? I'm not liking this.
dontmatter said:
I was disappointed by the announcement.
The time to sell 50 million songs dropped from 39 to 37 days over the previous 50 million. That's less than 3 million more songs in a 37 day period.
Normally I might call that marginal growth, but in the same press release they tout the popularity of the exclusive Across the Universe song.
One exclusive song for tsunami relief may have accounted for all the growth. Without this one song, the growth may have been flat or down.
This is troubling give the number of iPods, Shuffles sold just prior.
--Sebastian
VIIGemina said:
The previous period included Christmas. Show me a store that INCREASES its sales in the month after Christmas and I'll show you an incredible success story.
dontmatter said:
Consider sesonality into all sales numbers like this. The drop is likely an aberation partly, if not wholy, caused by a spike resulting from fallout from the holiday buying season in the states, etc. If you graph the run rates you see the that holiday seson is really a spike in comparison to the run rates for other periods of time.
wordmunger said:
I would expect Christmas to have an impact on iPod sales. I'm not sure that iTunes sales are so seasonal. Were people buying iTunes for Christmas?
I would expect the iPod sales to drive iTunes sales. So are we saying that all the new Christmas iPod owners were done buying music by Jan 24th?
--Sebastian
lalcan said:
Yeah. The only problem, unfortunately, is that most of them rather download music illegaly than to spend money if there was a ITMS Latin America...
Daschund
wordmunger said:
I think it might have to do with the first-time iPod owners -- got them as Christmas gifts. They're probably checking out the iTMS and buying a few tunes for the very first time. Plus, I know some people who also received iTunes gift certificates along with their new iPods, so they're pretty much forced to buy something at the iTMS.
And let's not forget about the iTunes/Pepsi promotion going on now. I know I'm buying more soda as a result of it.
Just wondering what effect the iTunes capable Motorola phone may have on this growth rate?
Let's see here,
add Japan
add South America
add iPods at all price ranges
add Motorola iTunes capable cell phones
Me personally, I think music sales @ Apple should continue their upward spiral for a time yet.
Let's see here,
add Japan
add South America
add iPods at all price ranges
add Motorola iTunes capable cell phones
Me personally, I think music sales @ Apple should continue their upward spiral for a time yet.
rjwill246 said:
Good for Apple. I, too, love my iPod, iTunes and iTMS.
However, I voted against the story appearing on MR. It's been a long-standing issue of whether a negative vote is against the story content or the story's appropriateness for the site. I subscribe to the latter. s.n.goat
Yvan256 said:
/vicmacs throws Yvan a calculator... hrrmmmm.... are you using napster by any chance?
do the math
sw1tcher said:
Yeah i never drank pop but now since this promotion ive drank 15 in a month that is a ton for me. Also i am 15 for 15 thanks to the helpfull tilt trick.
do the free downloads count when they calculate how many songs were sold?
Wow. Impressive chart! I kinda had a hunch they'd do it this year. We'll see if things keep going this well for Apple. Of course, it's not possible to maintain this sort of sales growth forever, so the question is, when does the pattern start to break?samiam said:From a semilog plot, it looks to me like Apple's right on track for 1B this year:
I've only bought 2 songs from the iTMS. I don't have them anymore, and have no desire to re-acquire them, nor do I plan on purchasing/downloading any more songs from the iTMS...since, quite frankly (IMO, of course), there's too much filler junk to sort through to make a purchase worthwhile. This is a problem with the music industry, not the iTMS - the iTMS's continued success might just convince the music industry to change their ways. Guess what happens after that - an even more successful iTMS!
It depends on how much it costs, and what the benefits are. On the Canadian iTMS I can purchase an album at home in my PJs for much cheaper than I can buy a CD from a brick-and-mortar store that I would have to travel to (on public transit, through the snow). That difference is valuable to me. So is the ability to purchase single tracks, which saves me money. So is the ability to purchase music that simply isn't available locally.louden said:
Also, I spend most of my time listening to music in transit, or in my office. I don't listen to it on an audiophile system, and so the reduced sound quality just isn't noticeable.
Sure, I would like lossless downloads. I would also like mahogany furniture rather than IKEA, and a Hummer rather than taking the subway. But the trade-offs involved simply aren't worth the expense to me. The same is true for music downloads -- to me, lossless formats aren't worth the costs (both in time and convenience). I don't see any point in being dogmatic about lossy vs. lossless -- it's all just a matter of cost/benefit analysis.
I don't follow this, given that it is iTunes itself (or the iPod) which is doing all of the heavy lifting -- the sound system essentially just amplifies the input.
Given that it is a digital store, without the overhead of brick-and-mortar, they don't have to sell many copies to make a ton of money of back-catalog. Wired had an excellent article on this, called The Long Tail, that demonstrated that even obscure items can be purchased often enough to make them highly profitable, especially given that the marginal cost of additional catalog items is pretty close to zero. Also, more popular items can actually drive the sales of less well-known items (through recommendation systems). So it makes quite a lot of sense for iTMS to add as much material as it can, even if some of it may not be purchased all that often.dontmatter said: