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iTunes Music Store sells 275,000 Tracks in 18 Hours
physicsnerd writes "According to this article on Billboard.com, Apple's iTunes Music store sold 275,000 tracks in its first 18 hours of operation. The Register.com estimates that this netted Apple just under $100,000! Not too bad for a 99 cents store."
Impressive considering the connection problems people were having. Remains to be seen what usage will be after the hype settles down.
This should send (yet another) wake up call to the music industry. Online music trading is so pervasive only because it beats the hell out of paying $18US for a music cd. This is merely a step in the right direction - this is by no means perfect or even viable long term. I don't give this good chances over time - a pioneer is the guy (or gal) laying in the field with an arrow in their back. But, it's a start, and maybe it'll whack some of the riaa/mpaa execs with a cluebat.
I was very envious today when my friend with his ibook was able to log into iTunes and download 15 songs in minutes. Since it stores you credit card, it is perhaps TOO easy to download songs (Parents giving credit card numbers to kids may find a large bill next month).
I may now have to buy an Apple just to use the service. It's easy to use, has a wide selection, and is everything a music service should be. Only time will tell if they have the pricing right.
I don't know what took the music industry so long.
For you PC users who haven't seen the store, let me tell you, that place is addictive as crack rock. The default settings are such that you click "buy song" and it starts downloading. With a cable modem, I was able to get an album of 9 Tracks in a few minutes. All without getting my lazy ass up and going to the store.
I expect that within a year, there will be MUG meets where the topic of discussion will be "Music Store Addiction:How I lost my wife and house downloading music".
Just wait till Apple releases iTunes for Windows, so you PC users can join in the fun.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Here in Canada I can't buy squat from the iTunes Music Store, but I have been playing with it since it 'opened for business' - we can preview, but not actually buy anything outside of the U.S.
.Mac users can peddle their wares through the online store. I hope their selection grows quickly (yes there's a lot of stuff missing right now). I hope they increase their bitrate (I can hear the difference between the streamed previews and actual CD's). The DRM is not ideal, but in practice it's not imposing. Windows version is coming soon. ...And... dammit... bring it to Canada! iWant to go shopping!!!
If I was allowed to buy, I probably would have purchased 10-20 songs by now.
Yes I have Acquisition (a really sweet Mac Gnutella client), and I have the usual assortment of piracy^H^H^H^H^H^H file sharing tools for Windows, but in that sea of file searching it's easy to lose one's vision of a really nice way to download music.
For example: I figured I would try to find some old Tears For Fears music. In the search field I just typed "Tears For Fears". In less than 5 seconds I had a track listing of 6 different Tears For Fears albums, including tracks I never knew they had done (did you know they covered Bowie's 'Ashes to Ashes'?)
Let me say this another way to better illustrate just how cool it is: it was EVERY ALBUM TRACK, listed only ONCE. I pick the song and I get it, really fast. With a file sharing app I pick from a list of thousands of different rips of the same songs, all of varying quality. I hit download, and maybe the host is slow. Maybe I get a "swarmed" download that won't be reconstructed properly when it gets here. Maybe it won't even really be the song I think I'm downloading. Maybe I get "remotely queued". Maybe it looked like a good bitrate before I downloaded it, but it turned out to be a crappy rip.
On the Apple service I hit "play" and I'm previewing the music in real time. I hit "download" and I've got the actual song I want, with no glitches.
Seriously - with these advantages, plus the fact that it is actually legal, I can't see why people wouldn't shell out a buck a song.
Like everybody else I hope Apple creates an indy section, maybe even something iDisk-based so that
As someone who switch to Macs last year, I read about the announcement a little after it happened, downloaded iTunes4 and gave it a test run.
I don't know about the connection errors others were reporting, as I didn't have any. I already own an iPod, so the AAC/MP3 issue isn't one for me as it is for some others making posts here. I also had no problem setting up my account - I had an account when I bought my first Mac a year ago, and just used that.
The biggest thing I noticed when I started it up was the ability to finally buy the 1 song off of a track I wanted. Bob Dylan is OK, but I just wanted "Growing in the Wind". That's it. A buck later, and I had it. Another 2 or 3 minutes later, it was on.
From there, I wound up spending $20 on the service. No problems, except that it didn't have everything I wanted (I'm still trying to get Queen's Bohemien Rhapsody). But I spend more in 2 days than I've spent on music in 1 year.
Is is perfect? No, but you don't need an iPod - you can burn the music to a regular audio CD if you like, and either rerip this to MP3 (with a loss of quality), or just play the CD in a regular player.
But so far, it's 95% of what I've wanted with online music sales. Hopefully they'll get more music on there, maybe even some game/anime music (as that stuff is *way* more expensive than it needs to be), and more players out there will start support AAC. I'm not worried about the latter - since its part of the MPEG-4 standard, that should only be a matter of time and a firmware upgrade later.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Apple may very well succeed because of the low investment necessary...
Not that low of an investmet at all, actually. According to this interview:
TIME: Can you say anything about [Music Store's] development costs or Apple's investment?
Jobs: I had somebody comment today, "Now that you have introduced your store, do you expect a lot others?" And I guess our answer is no. This is really hard. Over the last several years we've created an infrastructure to pump oceans of bits out in the world for movie trailers and stuff, and that's tens of millions of dollars for server farms and networking farms ? it's huge ? and we've already got that in place. And to have millions of transactions, and to get our online store all tied into SAP and have the auditors bless it, that's tens of millions of dollars. We have one-click shopping, only us and Amazon have that, and then to make a jukebox ? how much does it cost to make iTunes and make it popular? A lot! But we've got that. And then iPod, if you want to make an iPod, what does that cost? Well, nobody has done it but us, people have tried, but they haven't even come close. That's a lot of money. So we've already made these investments and we can leverage them. And then we've invested more on top of that to make a store. But to recreate this, it's tens of millions of dollars and years. That's why I don't think this is going to be so easy to copy.