Slashdot Mirror
Apple Sells A Million Songs in Debut Week
Scrameustache writes "According to an Apple press release, the iTunes Music Store sold over one million songs during its first week. Over half of the songs were purchased as albums, and over half of the 200,000 songs offered on the iTunes Music Store were purchased at least once.
Those new iPods are selling like hotcakes too..."
Well it seems to me that there's room for everything in this world. Room for people that want things the legal way and the whiners that love music for free that keep whining about not buying on the ITunes Music Store.
Let's see how this one keeps up for the next year!
Unfortunatly, these sales trends wont continue unless Apple can get more music contracts. No torpedo-ing will happen unless this occurs...
Even then, does Apple's model adequatly compensate the artist? Does it allow entry for independant artists? Does it even have the potential to work against the RIAA, or will it simply strengthen its grip?
no
Most people aren't thieves. The merely want their content delivered the way they want it. It should be simple for a company to offer a better downloading experience then a decentralized p2p. I'd be willing to pay if the offer me more value then p2p programs. By that I mean easier searchs, high quality files, ability to find related music, and better availibility. RIAA has really been doing nothing but shooting itself it's foot and watching it bleed.
If they weren't restricting to credit cards with a US billing address. Like VISA isn't the same globally?
Ralf
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russel
I thought this iTunes thing was full of DRM gotchas, such as having to re-buy the songs if your computer died..? Are there really that many idiotic people around or am I just misinformed?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
For some reason, I don't think the holdup for getting music into the iTunes Music Store is the digitizing part. It's probably the legal wrangling with the companies that actually own the music.
Donald Roeber
Generating 2048 Bits of Randomness...
I highly doubt that they have problems ripping things at decent speed, its a problem of getting the music labels to allow them to put the songs up. This is still a new technology, and I would think that the labels are still uneasy about allowing their music go to up in this format.
How much of this success is due to this being a truly significant advance in implementations versus Apple simply having a heavy presence in the market?
The secret is in the direct tie to iTunes. It's difficult to overstate how convenient it is to be able to shop for music within your music player as opposed to fiddling with some web-based download service.
This is the kind of thing which Apple's control over hardware, software, and consumer applications together permits it to excel at. What is astonishing is that Microsoft has proved so poor at this kind of coordination.
ASA
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I'm always thrilled to see Apple succeed at something, since I think they tend to make beautifully designed products. I just hope that this success isn't the event that keeps the parasitic recording industry form withering away.
Anything which encourages people to purchase music directly by cutting out the retail link can only help artists in the long run. If people get used to this kind of thing, they're much more likely to purchase music from independent artists someday - because independent artists will probably never be able to afford to get their CDs into record stores, but it won't be too much trouble for them to get onto download services.
ASA
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I think it might be closer to: somebody has possibly finally figured out that making products and services AVAILABLE to people who are proven to actually have the means and the inclination to ACTUALLY PAY FOR STUFF that they find valuable. Windows users buy their machines on price first, features second (and steal half their software from work third...), Linux users have moral objections to paying for stuff that's already been sold a million times, whereas Apple users understand that time pretty much equals money and would rather pay to take the hassle out of life and get on with the rest of theirs.
That was classic intercourse!
but I suspect it's due to licensing arrangements. Often the same artist is represented by different labels in different territories - he might have been signed in the UK by a small Indie, but needs big-muscle distribution to break the states etc. Big distributer sells in the US, indie still sells in UK.
This causes problems online though as customers and territories are now now no longer tied together - you could buy from whichever territory offered the cheapest identical product. One big free market.....nope, couldn't have that, could we? so that's why you need a US Visa.
They should expose their store through XML-RPC or SOAP, so that I can write my own iTunes. The money would still go to them.
(Never gonna happen, I know.)
-jfedor
I'm still not sure how this service is going to make a lot of money.
Well obviously $30mil in profit is nothing to sneeze at. Plus for Apple we're talking about an adjunct to their primary business. I know some others are talking about "replacing" the current model, but Apple would be more than happy to have a reliable $30mil coming in every year.
But one aspect you're missing is, how many more ipods are being sold because of this? How many more Mac "switchers"/converts are being created now? This is just another way for Apple to create market share for themselves by adding value to computers, taking them beyond just generic tools and making them useful for more people (other than surfing of course). Plus, it gets them in bed with the entertainment industry even more. With Steve's association with Pixar and therefore Disney, the next obvious step would be some type of video distribution. I'm not talking general purpose VOD, nope, I'm talking things like kids shows and cartoons, where the demand for high resolutions (and therefore bandwidth) isn't nearly as much as more adult fare.
So overall you can't look at this as a thing upon itself. It is merely part of the bigger picture that Apple to drawing to keep itself significant in the market. Kudos to them.
So you sit at your Apple (tm) Computer, load up your Apple (tm) OS, load the Apple (tm) iTunes(tm) software, click on the button which goes to the Apple (tm) iTunes (tm) Music Stores, buy some DRM-ed music and then save it on your MP3 player, which can only be an Apple (tm) iPod (tm).
And everyone on slashdot applauds...
People wanted to be able to download a wide variety of "good" music, load it onto an MP3 player and burn their own CD from their purchase. By all accounts (except perhaps those of some vocal sixteen year olds who think the world owes them a record collection) Apple has delivered this, They did the research, developed the tech, made the difficult deals, took the risks, generated the buzz, and now I hope they profit handsomely from it.
The RIAA reps the companies that get the music into the download -- engineers, producers, designers, and, yes, lawyers -- all of whom need to be paid, and will get their slice. The size of that slice is spelled out in a contract which both parties sign. Is the size of that slice "fair?" I dunno. What percentage of the price of that soda finds its way back to the chemists and bottlers? How many pennies on the cigar dollar get back to the guy rolling the leaves? How many nickels on the Big Mac pricetag work their way back to the cattlerancher? Do we stop consuming these products (and a million others) until we "ger answers?"
Say I'm a small-town chemist who just developed a new flavor -- how do I get my soda bottled and onto the shelves at the 7-11? You mean -- it's not easy?? I can't just pull my truck up to the back of ths store and stock the shelves myself? I have to make a [shudder] DEAL?! Oh, the Injustice!
Is this new venture going to change the world, overthrow evil, and bring about a Glorious Workers' Revolution? No, silly, it's gonna let you download music easily and legally onto your computers and disks. No more or less than it was designed to do.
I've never had a use for Apple, Macs, or Steve Jobs, but my hat is off to them on this.
This is what happens when you give a user a legitamate way to get music in digital form. My friends and I would pay a reasonable price for an MP3/OGG/? track if it was awailable (and NOT restricted, if I pay money, I better have the right to space shift it).
RAAA, get a clue!
Free speech is getting expensive...
>if they could keep up their one million songs per week rate (doubtful)
I wouldn't assume they can't keep that rate up. Of course, it may slack off for a while, but bear in mind the service is currently available to only a very, very small segment of the potential market: Apple users (5%) who use iTunes or own an iPod (??%, but certainly less than 100%). When they release their Windows version, it should ramp up sales by at least an order of magnitude. When they get the European and Japanese online, it should double it again. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 18 months from now, they were chugging along at a steady state of $250 million a year, plus whatever they make from the iPods and extra Macs.
Plus, I'm a lot more comfortable that a consumer-oriented company like Apple is spearheading this one. They've always been advocates of giving us more and restricting us less. Look at their track record... switching over to a BSD kernel, coming out with the ipod, releasing portions of their source code, giving out developer tools for free, giving us free software that is arguably the best out there (ilife). If that means I have to use their playerto use iTMS, then be it. It's better than Microsoft using WMP/IE/etc simply to further their proprietary format and giving us a shoddy media player at best (slowly slowly getting better, but playlists/vis/skins/library management is shoddy at best even at 9.0)
Seems that the puny, marginal WebObjects server and development environment were able to serve within its first week:
1 million secure creditcard transactions
1 million downloads, at about 3MB each
untold millions of 30 second song preview streamings
a gazillion searches
megazillions of Music Store pageviews
You know, makes you wonder what these Apple guys are thinking, using such marginal, non-Microsoft-based enterprise server products!
Talk about taking risks. No-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft or Dell, uh? Why go to the fringes and buy WebObjects with unlimited users/sessions for about $1000? Are you nuts?
(tongue in cheek, for the humor impaired)
Blah. I'll probably get modded down, but here goes...
"The recording industry is evil" mantra is like the "Big business is evil" mantra. It sounds real good and may be partially true, but artists still happily sign with labels without having a gun put to their head.
If a band is playing in some garage and a record exec comes in and puts down a contract, very few bands will say, "No, you're THE MAN! We want to stay independent! Sure, only the people in this area may ever hear us and we may only sell 100 albums a year and still have to work full time jobs, but at least we won't be working for someone evil like you!"
Record companies do put a lot of money into new artists before they even sell jack. That's one of the reasons they take so much on the back end. They take the risk of putting down hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to pay and promote a new artist that no one has heard of and just the year before was only singing in their church choir. If the artist sells lots of albums, I think the record company SHOULD make many times it's original investment because they're the ones that took the risk, not the artist.
It's easy to say "Oh, with the Internet any artist can distribute music on their own!" Yeah, that may be true but you still have to figure out some way to get people to your site. Record companies spend a lot of their money on promotion and marketing. If you put up a web site to sell your CD, MP3, ACC, whatever, but can't afford the money to promote it, aren't getting air play, have no video on MTV, no one knows who you are, your songs sound like they were produced in a garage, and you just hope you can just get by by having one fan tell another who tells another, you're probably not going to make a lot of money.
Some people talk about the record companies and their high prices like they're the Iraqi regime. They're keeping a tight grip on MUSIC, people! It's entertainment, not food and water. If you hate them, don't buy their music, don't steal their music. Just walk away and go read a book.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
Vindication.
And a bute rebuff against what the **AA's are trying to do; here is proff that they've been trying to defend an outdated bussines model.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Only a million dollars? From 5% of the market share, just in the US? You must be kidding. If this went cross-platform worldwide the money these people would make is astonomical. It's easy to use, and damn near addictive because you don't see the cost until you get your credit card bill a month later. Let's say, an average comsumer buys 2 CDs a month for approximately $30 (US). Now let's take the same user and give them access to all the same songs at $1 apiece. Plus when they download those songs let's just "suggest" they look at 5 more that are like each one. You have built in advertisement while the person is actually making the purchase, it is convenient, and they don't see any real tangible evidence that they've spent the money unless the go to the effort of burning CDs from the downloads. It's an ingenious system that has nowhere to go but up as far as profitibility is concerned. This week $1 million, next week 1.2 million. Next year, 100 million. 2 years from now, worldwide, the sky's the limit.
bkr
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
The worst of all this is why are people stupid enough to pay for music.
Maybe because people over the age of 16 understand that it takes work, time and money to make music, and would be happy to pay a fair price for a product delivered in a manner that they like?
Am I missing something here? $.99 a song means you are spending the equivalent of $15-$20 a CD (given the 15 to 20 tracks) Next, you can't use them like CDs because they are protected. And, as the Register has pointed out, crash your system, lose all your music. You don't own anything, heck the rules haven't been written yet and are subject to change. But my biggest problem with this whole system is the quality of music. You are paying top dollar for crap. (sorry) This stuff is ok for a handheld device with all the surrounding noise but try playing these files thru a decent system and you will hear the flaws. Sorry but I'm not buying anything from Apple or anyone else at these prices with these restrictions.
Remember that the 1 million songs are downloaded by:
US citizens that have a Mac running Mac OS X updated to QT 6.2 and iTunes 4 released a week ago.
I've seen at least a dozen post in these Apple Music Store stories telling people that ask if they can download a song again to backup (complete with bold font to show their superior intellect).
Who has the time to do these constant backups of all the random crap on your computer. I try hard to keep copies of stuff like tax records, but I don't backup my music collection or other random junk.
Apple should allow people to download the songs again that they've already purchased. Live Phish allows you to do this. Maybe there is some DRM issue that makes this difficult, but, otherwise, I don't know why they wouldn't allow this.
-prator
So the first guy who manages to intercept the data stream that goes to the cd burner (should be near trivial) effectively is in violation of the DMCA :-).
AAC just makes it harder to rip the audio, not impossible. It will take a while for such tools to appear. Also I suspect demand won't be very high since most people will prefer to have their mp3 directly ripped from a cd (AAC is already lossy, decoding and then reencoding only loses more quality).
However, it seems that Apple, unlike the RIAA, gets the point. People are willing to pay for the convenience of being able to find what they want fast and easy, not to finance obsolete distribution methods. The 99 cent price is by all means very reasonable (though still a bit high) and there are many people who'll be happy to pay for the convenience of not having to hunt down each and every track they want to listen to. On the other hand this puts the market value of my current mp3 collection at roughly 3500$. Much less than the RIAA would want us to believe but still a substantial amount of money.
Idea for the RIAA: make lots of noise about sueing people, offer mp3 owners to legalize their mp3 collections for a reasonable price -> profit. If they do it right they could squeeze some revenue out of this without actually having to do anything beyond handing out electronic licenses.
Jilles
Generally, I'm inclined to agree with you.
... not in most places, anyway.
However, what we (read: us consumers) need is for Apple to succeed, whether this is overpriced low-quality music or not. Based on my last trip to various CD-selling locations (just a few days ago), $12-$14 will not buy you the album from the record store
If Apple can make a success out of selling on-demand, relatively cheap music to individual consumers, and have some reasonable method to both allow those consumers to exercise their Fair Use rights while cutting down on piracy (even if it is only illusory), then the RIAA loses its most important argument: That online access to music, and swapping of music, costs the industry money. I mean, how true can it be if Apple is making money by lowering prices on music?
At the very least, it strengthens our (read: the anti-RIAA contingent) basic counter-argument to the RIAA: it is the exorbinant price of music, not piracy, that it costing the RIAA member companies money. Lower prices, and albums will sell better.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
What a load of toss. Linux users don't have a "moral objection" to paying for things, far from it. Apple users are known for paying for goods with ridiculously high margins because they've convinced themselves that their kit is "higher quality" than what the proles use. Or something. Nobody uses Macs at work anyway so they don't get the opportunity to warez stuff.
I mean come on. It's pretty simple - Macs are only bought by an affluent section of the market that places a great deal of importance on "lifestyle tech". This is simple market dynamics - stupid stereotypes of what non-Mac users think or do just shows you to be a fully paid up drone.
There are three types of people posting on this thread.
1: The cheap bastards who at no price except for free, will music be cheap enough. These people are impossible to satisfy with a realistic business model.
2: The vast majority, who just care about price. DRM is acceptable as long as it's wussy and if the price is cheap enough, who cares. A little bit of inconvenience due to DRM is no big deal if the price is low enough (and mind you, the DRM on these AAC files is pretty wussy).
3: A loud minority for whom a purchase from the iTunes store is a political one, that feel supporting any DRM is supporting the powers that be, the music industry, the RIAA, etc. These are the types of people for whom any purchase can be a political statement. The types of people who berate you for shopping at WalMart or eating a hamburger because it supports the corrupt meat-packing industry. They have a point, but they are in the minority ... most people don't sit and go through a checklist trying to figure out which product is doing the most harm to which people before they go out to the grocery store and shop.
The money is at #2. #1 will never be satisfied and #3 will never shut up. Go get the money, Apple.
If it's crap, then why are you breaking the law to download it?
Either you like it, and want it, and recognize the value in its production and distribution, and should pay for it, or you find the music valueless and should not want to spend any of your time/effort/bandwidth downloading it.
If it's on your computer, and you put it there on purpose, you should pay for it.
Ok I didn't really make my point clearly in the first post.
Everyone is quick to claim this project is a success. I'm taking a wait and see attitude. Sure, it's nice to see people spending money on a legal on-line music distribution system, but I wouldn't call it a success until most of the people that use other systems illegally migrate to paid systems like Apple's.
I still have a hard time believing people that use the windows based file trading systems for free will stop that practice in favor of a system that costs money and distributes the music in a more restrictive format.
-ted
I think it's worth noting that this music store is exactly the sort of thing Apple does well, and which makes being an Apple denizen such a joy. Xerox makes the GUI, Apple turns it into a product. Airport was already around. Apple made it easy. And there were many many MP3 Players out there. Apple didn't even write iTunes. They just morphed Sound Jam into it. And here we are again. As a mac user, I've come to smile whenever I hear Apple will enter a new market. I know they'll get it right, or close enough. It took three versions for iTunes to win me over completely. Wait till the Music Store grows a bit. For now, it is a frighteningly easy to use system. Apple is a company that excels at packaging, and that has made all the difference.
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to do it by not dying." -Woody Allen
So I ran the output of the original and the re-ripped Cd through a signal analysis package. there as an 11% rms difference between the wave forms. that's pretty huge certainly well above a pyscho-accoustic threshold. (that's about the difference a carpeted room versus a hardwood fllow can make. and easily noticed on ear phones.
also the specta were slightly differently shaped. at the high end. you can hear that.
also the original ACC had no content above 15.5Khz. that's no CD quality though with my ears its hard to hear the difference. It does however mean that when you re-rip you will unvoidably erode the spectrum further, and into a range I can hear.
thus re-ripping a CD is NOT the answer. its not the same as buying something at the music store. so its critical that I be able to play the originals on various devices.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Very few people have mentioned this, and I think it bears notice.
The sales so far only represent Mac owners in the United States.
How much larger is the Windows user base? We're going to have a Windows version later this year.
How much larger is the international market? Apple's going to start taking International sales soon.
On top of that, Fortune magazine reports that Apple is in talks with AOL to have iTunes be the official music player/music store of America Online. How many more sales will that be?
We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg, folks.
aka It's all about the Back Catalouge. This is not just a business model for an era when promotion aside the costs of recording and distributing music have dramatically shrunk. We are entering the _th decade of recorded music. With that much music out there and a global market it makes more sense to charge a dime a tune. Or at the very least charge this rate for the older music. It will encourage people to expand there musical boundaries. Copyright aside why pay the same for a 30 years old Door tune as the latest Dave Matthews song? Perpetual copyright doesn't encourage anything but sitting on your arse on a beach and collecting money for something you did eons go. My point is that not only will they sell more music with a lower price point,but as the body of recorded music grows you will have no choice but to sell for less.