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Apple Sells Two Million Songs in 16 Days
burgburgburg writes "According to Apple's latest press release, iTunes Music Store has sold over two million songs in the 16 days that it has been open. Quick calculations show this is around 1.44 songs per second. And as was the case last week, over half of the songs purchased so far were purchased as albums. Over 4,300 songs were added to the system yesterday, including older catalog stuff (Doors, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus), new albums (Cold, Lizz Wright, and Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs), prerelease tracks (Michelle Branch, Da Brat, Jesse Harris and Kenna) and more."
Steve Jobs said that the most important thing in the beginning was to get the big 5 record labels on board. Once they did that, and got the thing up and running, they could start courting the indy labels. According to a interview with Time Magazine the indy labels have been calling nonstop since the Music Store started. We'll see indy music soon enough. I can't wait for an extended trance library...
Please provide a source. According to E Online, the record for weekly sales is 1.7 million (by Eminem). How can he sell 7 million in 2 weeks if he can't even sell 2 million in 1 week?
When apple incorporated as apple they supposedly signed an agreement with apple records not to go into the record production bussiness.
from Wikipedia:
At one point, Apple Records sued Apple Computer for trademark infringment because the computer company broke their earlier agreement not to add sound to its computers. The case was settled out of court. Apple computers ever since have included a sound labelled sosumi ("So, sue me").
The label became successful, surviving the legal dissolution of the Beatles in 1974, and continuing to issue new material till 1976, although the holding company, Apple Corps., Ltd., is still in existence. The label was resurrected around the time of the Anthology for use on all Beatles CDs.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
According to this osOpinion.com article Apple claims 5 million users for OS X (as of January, this year). Assuming no one else started using OS X since then (pretty poor assumption, but whatever), we see that 5 million users downloaded 2 million songs in 16 days. This is a rate of 125,000 songs per day. At 365 days a year, we see 45.6 million songs per year. Spread across our 5 million users we see 9.12 songs per year. Admittedly not huge, but still 3x larger than your numbers.
Admittedly, this is based on some schetchy assumptions. 1) Purchasing rates won't remain at this level. 2) The number of OSX users I'm sure is higher now than it was in January.
But still, not what you claim.
You can't get a blue screen on a black and white monitor.
We're not buying any numbers about the rate of sales to "the average Mac user" unless you've got a source or a much clearer description of your supposed stat -- what population are you using, please? -- but let me ask you this: What would "impress" you? Apparently a profitable online method for music retailing that convinces the big labels to allow unintrusive, intuitive DRM in the files and a per-song sales model, that doesn't impress you... Not when it's only selling around 90 songs a minute or around 1.4 songs a second.
In 16 days, Apple's store has more than doubled the sales from the other "legit" online music resellers put together last year. I wonder if they're at all impressed. If not, we shouldn't expect them to try to move to a similar sales model...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Even more likely he's a troll who posts the same freaking comment on every Apple discussion.
Or worse, have a gap between each track. Apple, oh Apple, WHY won't you address the issue of seamless (but still tracked) music?? if MP3/AAC can't handle it, then you should be supporting OGG or something that can.
Uhh, all the albums I play in XMMS are without gaps in between tracks (other than those on the CD) thanks to the XMMS Crossfade Plugin. There's nothing intrinsic to the MP3 format that causes the gaps. To do this on the iPod, Apple would have to transfer the next song into the 32- or 64-MB buffer and tell the hardware to immediately beging decoding the next file once the first one is done. They're already buffering the next song, but my guess is that the decoding hardware cannot handle song changes fast enough.
The issue has been brought up many times on the Apple discussion forums, but I've never really seen a good response on the issue.
And the iPod can't even play a trance cd ripped as one track without stopping halfway through. Why the hell can't it read in more data while playing what is currently in memory?? Grrr!!!
This seems to be an issue with Apple's caching algorithm. They apparently assume that people will be playing smaller tracks as opposed to larger ones that do not fit in the buffer. When you are halfway through an album, the iPod flips out because the buffer is empty and it didn't know to continue reading the file from disk. The pause results from the iPod needing to go back to disk. This may be less of an issue on the new iPods with the 64-MB buffer, especially if the album is less than 64 MB.
I don't know why they haven't fixed these problems; they seem relatively simple on the surface.
They count sales every week. Most records don't sell more records its second week than its first week (One by the Beatles being an obvious exception). The simple fact is that no record has ever sold 7 million copies in two weeks. The poster who said so was pulling numbers out of thin air.