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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."
Is that there is no mechanism for indie bands and labels to get a piece of this action. This is a neat service, but it really only helps the big guys, while Apple has always been about the littleguy.
best web host ever
Sosumi
I hear that some euros have put together a method for using the iTunes store already. This tomfoolery, along with comments from Sony Music that they don't want Windows users to have the same freedom as Apple users do now, makes me think that the RIAA is already getting cold feet, despite the money.
Europeans are too smart, and the RIAA is getting nervous because they don't have control over all those Montenegrins, Serbians, and Andorrans.
When all those German techno records starting moving to the top of the store, Steve Jobs new there was a problem. He put on his best black turtleneck and headed for the server room, but when he looked in the mirror, he realized that he was Dietre from Sprockets.
Man! That was a weird dream!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Seriously, it would be cool if they got big enough as a content reseller to influence the DRM debate in favor of common sense.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
Last night by 7pm I'd delivered 2 pizzas! By 9 pm it was already up to 11 pizzas! Where's my slashdot story?
Also, they still only have part of the Cibo Matto album "Viva! La Woman," and have only two albums from They Might Be Giants.
But it is getting there. I'm very pleased I was able to download Cake's "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" without paying for the rest of the album, which frankly sounds exactly the same as their last three albums, only without the novelty of being fresh and new.
Once the Apple catches up stocking the stuff I just mentioned, then maybe they will move on to the more obscure bands and indie labels.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Since the people downloading mp3s are only doing it for the convenience, not to save money.
Eminem has a slightly larger user base, I suspect.
Read: Apple has sold 2 million consumer friendly DRM enabled songs, with the big 5 on board and attracting new labels every day. Already the most successful online music distibutor ever, Apple has poised itself to be a major player for years to come in the emerging of the digital hub. In two years the ipod could have a big brother (or may just morph into) that downloads movies using the same basic format. A revenue stream like the ipod/music store combo is a god send and is probably keeping Apple afloat during this G4 debacle -
Oh and iTunes4, with cover art, an intergrated music store, my ipod interface, and streaming (and downloading) capabilities for my friends over the net, please show me the windows app that lets me do this out of the box with a great interface to boot. For 'free' on every mac.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
I can give you one data point.
128 bit ACC ->AIFF -> 128bit mp3
produces 11% RMS distortion of the original waveform. enought to hear.
on the otherhand
128 bit ACC -> AIFF -> 128 bit ACC
produces 6% RMS distortion.
I have not yet tested higher bit rates for MP3. however I would be surprised if 6% was not an aupper bound. This is not a pyscho acoustic test, merely an RMS test. 6% is quite acceptable for most listeners since a change of speakers or room can produce a simmilar effect. what is not clear is how this affects sounds humans are espically perceptive too such as the crach of symbols or noise in quiet passages.
Finally I have made an intriguing observation. I compared the AIFF I got off my CD to the ACC-> AIFF I downloaded from iTunes Music store. interestingly, the waveforms are not only different but the Pitch isdifferent. that's right the music plays just slightly (imperceptibly) slower on the iTunes version. I'm not sure why. Are not CD's digital, and if so what could cause the rate of playback to change. (were talking millseonds per second shifts in rate of play). It's also unlcear why the waveform of the ACC I purchased and the one I generated off the CD differed in ways besides pitch. The difference was larger than the difference between MP3 and ACC encoding using itunes. this suggests that the en-codec that apple is using is not the SAME one as the one found in itunes and introduces considerably more distrotion than the one found in itunes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It ess time for zee apple money dance!
About time. Apple got a clue. Cheap singles, downloadable, mix and match. Just the formula that's been obvious for years now, just needed to be done on a big scale from a brand name outfit. Any of the big guys could have done this, software side, hardware side, music industry side. People asked them, they knew about it.
Just shows how many bad ideas can get investor money and interest, and how long a good idea can lay there begging to be picked up, even when millions of people are pointing at it, going "hey, look, a good idea!"
And just think the bigger push for better and cheaper broadband now, just from this one move, and it's a "legit" move, too, zero "controversy" about it or it's legality. It would be *nice* if it was cheaper than a dollar,and a scosh more flexible, but all in all it's a good start anyway.
WHAT! This is very impressive, 2 million songs that weren't bought befoe. $50 mil is hardly pocket change, that could buy Steve another jet. That's money that they didn't have before, that could have been downloaded from Kazaa. How many songs have the other downloadable music services sold? This is a Good Thing, as more labels and songs get added, and when this flips to Windows, just how many songs will be downloaded? My question is will the servers be able to scale enough once that happens?
Not to belittle the store (as I'm anxiously awaiting the Windows version) but you can't expect that these numbers will remain constant once the newness wears off.
.
The first press release was that over 1 million sold in the first week. The second release was that over 2 million sold in 16 days. Using those numbers it would indicate that sales are slowing down, otherwise it should have been two million in 14 days.
Is this statistically accurate? No. My point is that two weeks is just WAY TOO SMALL a sample to determine the long term economic viability of this project.
I'd like to see it succeed, as I've felt the industry always needed something to replace the 45 single. Good luck to Apple, but to say "if they did this for a year" is one huge if
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?
Apple has what, < 5% of the desktop market share? If these figure hold steady, then the Windows release of iTunes could generate close to a billion (1000 million) dollars.
That's what's impressive. Not that they have a service that could generate $50 million/year, but they have a potential US market (not a world market, but a US market) that is 20x larger to expand into. Start adding in Canada, Mexico, the EU, India, Japan... and there's a amazingly huge amount of money to be made by Apple.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
>Two million songs is not impressive at all.
Yes, for a company that has only 3% of computer marketshare, and an even smaller percent (85% ? of Mac users use OSX and lets imagine 90% downloaded Itunes 4) For a company that caters to this small of an audience, I would say two million songs in two weeks isn't bad. Macs have often been stepping stones before major software breaks out (I call it getting usability down, think AOL started on the Mac)
>This means total sales for the year would be >about $50 million, which in corporate terms is >pocket change.
It is pocket change. Now lets do some extrapolation of data shall we? 2 million songs in 16 days. Imagine if (when) this software is realeased for free on Windows, as it is currently under development. Lets say 90,000 downloads per day for mac users would extrapolate to be almost 3,000,000 for PC users, (thinking in strict terms of market share) so in two weeks time (after this software is set up for windows) we could see a revenue stream of over $1 Billion a year. Hardly chump change.
>Two million songs means that the average Apple >user is buying songs at a rate of 2-3 a year. >Hardly a figure that would impress anyone.
Are you Alomex, the great spreader of Fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD)? Or do you just wanna be a karma whore? The fact remains that the service has only been available for a little of two weeks, so each mac user downloaded two to three songs in two weeks. A song a week. (using your data)
>The only positive spin out of two million songs >sold is that it does prove that iTunes is not a >dud. Any other implication beyond that is pure >hype.
Positive Spin, in two weeks Apple has become the largest legit online music service company. And they can make money at this. They HAVE the backing of the music industry. They will soon have indy bands.
Please, take a moment to look at what the facts are before posting. I am getting annoyed with Karma whores spreading fake information about Microsoft, Apple, anything that doesn't run on or is Linux. The right tool for the right job.
Damn
Blah Blah Blah.
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.
Like Coldplay's Parachutes album. It's priced at $11.99 -- WTF happened to 9.99 albums? But it's only 10 songs (one of which is a whole 46 seconds long). OK, so buy them individually. Sorry, nope. Track 10 is marked "album only." The other Coldplay Album is 10.89 for 11 songs, basically the price per song.
Now perhaps the record labels are forcing these limitations on Apple. Maybe they are the reason that a CD of 18 songs is for some reason missing one track and available "partial album only" so you have to buy all remaining 17 songs at 99 cents per. I mean, how can you sell some albums like Dream Theater's Scenes from a Memory or 6DOIT which are complete album-long epics and offer it as "partial album only?" Heaven forbid I get 70 minutes worth of music for only $9.99. If you sell little 3 minute songs you can get over 20 songs on a CD that way... That's less than 50 cents a track. Oh my guiddy aunt, can't allow that.
(Maybe I *will* go back to aquiring my CDs the old fashioned way after all... Maybe the record labels want that to happen. Maybe they want iTMS to fail. Maybe I will fail to clarify what I mean by "old fashined way" with respect to aquiring my CDs.)
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.
"The waveforms are not only different but ... the the music plays just slightly (imperceptibly) slower on the iTunes version."
Apple went back to the master tapes for a lot of their recordings. Jobs claimed in his announcement that some Music Store files would actually sound better than commercial CDs, which are not always made from such good sources.
If the track was converted to digital format from scratch, rather than using the same digital source as your CD, it would be reasonable to expect (minor) differences in playback speed and waveform.
They need to have a system to tell users when songs are added. Several songs I want (Led Zep, latest Allman Bros etc) were not on the store when I checked. I would get them when they are available but I will not check every time I hear they added songs.
As everybody probably agrees, this is a great step in the right direction. This is exactly the kind of system that will bring "MP3s" (i know they're not MP3s, but that's what everybody actually means when they say "digital audio" or whatever) to the masses, legally. However, there are a few problems.
These songs are all AAC. Now, a good deal of the "new" or "lesser-known" formats that Apple has picked up on, they've turned into pretty much ubiquitous formats, for all systems. So, the fact that AAC is largely unsupported by most media players, hardware players, and other audio utilities is only going to be an issue for a little while. Once Apple has propogated AAC all throughout the PC world, it'll be just as popular as Vorbis or MPC. But there are several problems with this. Number one, as everybody knows, it's all DRM. That means that i'm paying just about the same price as a retail CD (or probably a little less, but not much), but i can only play those songs on approved hardware. (I haven't read up on Apple's AAC DRM scheme, but i assume it's much like WMA's.) So that's one problem. Another problem is, AAC is lossy, and not everybody likes it, for that reason and others. If i'm paying for a song, i want it in full, crystal-clear, lossless quality, so that i can encode it into my lossy format of choice, in order to make it compatible with my desired hardware/software. Or, at least, i'd like the option to (i understand that not everybody wants to download a full lossless CD). Of course, if they ever did go lossless, they'd have to get rid of the DRM (or it would be mostly pointless).
But i think, realistically, everybody knows that that's not going to happen. No matter how far the music industry goes with this, the music will ALWAYS be DRM. There is never going to be a service that offers just plain MP3s/Vorbises/FLACs/WAVs/<insert desired audio format>. It's always going to be restricted-access media, because the RIAA can't bear to let their content go freely to the user.
In other words, it's a step in the right direction, but i think it's the last one.
Think Different is too old anyway, and I think Eminem would have to change the line to "Bitch, I'm gonna switch you!"
(or maybe "Bill, I....", forget it).
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.