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Windows iTunes Sells A Million Songs In 3.5 Days
ajkst1 writes "According to an Apple press release, the iTunes Music Store has sold 1 million songs since its release on the Windows platform on October 16. Also of note is the 1 million downloads of the iTunes music program itself. When the iTMS was first released, it took a full week to sell a million songs. The store has now had 14 million songs purchased and downloaded since its original launch in April."
>> Windows iTunes Sells A Million Songs In 3.5 Days
Incorrect.
Fact: There were 1 million downloads of iTunes for Windows.
Fact: Between Windows and Mac there were one million songs in 3.5 days.
I downloaded iTunes on Wednesday and used it to buy an album that night. Even though I'm on 56k dial-up, it downloaded flawlessly (although it did take about 4 hours, as I expected). I have to say that I'm pretty impressed - for a free jukebox program, it's really high quality. It still has some issues and bugs that could be polished out of it, but overall it's a well designed and easy to use program that I have no major complaints about. It's heads and tails above Windows Media Player 9, and a better jukebox than Winamp (although I think Winamp is still a better standalone player). If Jobs can play his cards right, this could be big.
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I hope every one isn't posted to the front page like when iTMS first came out.
Seriously, I think iTMS for WIndows is going to be much bigger than most people have given it credit for. M$ can dismiss is all they want, but unless they have something better to offer I'm not seeing much viable competition. It amazes me that after Apple overwhelmingly demonstrated to the marketplace that customers don't want subscription fees or cutthroat DRM, there are still companies out there trying to make those business models work. Oh well, meanwhile iTunes will rise to the top fast.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Actually you can disable those services if you really want, also there is another serviced for CD burning galled "Gearsec.exe" you neglected to mention. This too can all be disabled if need be, at the expense of CD/DVD burning in iTunes. Admittedly I have no clue why apple couldnt just have these disabled by default and only enabled as needed. But if you are intelligent enough to know it is eating up memory you should be intelligent enough to disable it.
The appeal is that I can buy two good songs off of an otherwise crappy CD for $2, rather than being forced to buy the whole CD for $12+.
What possible advantage is there to this crippleware?
It's not so bad. Burn the AAC files to a CD, and rip them into MP3. Voila. (As for sound quality, I've done this and have zero complaints.)
-W
All unfair meta-mods are now being meta-meta-modded as retarded.
At one point I heard Mr. Jobs discussing the backend, and yes... the Xserve, Xserve RAID and the venerable MacOS X Server are all the behind-the-scenes puppetmasters for iTunes Music Store.
:)
Of course, Apple also uses Quicktime (once again, their own product), likely coupled with some in-house custom app to do the encoding and maintenace of the store, so you could say that when using iTunes, you're using Apple software from end to end, save for your OS if you happen to be stuck on a Windows box.
Of course for me on this 17" PowerBook, it's Apple to Apple from a to Z.
From the encoding of the track, to the storage, to the serving of the data to the client that receives it and the playback engine that processes it... all Apple hardware and software.
Few other companies in the world build "the whole widget", and even fewer make it all work so wonderfully.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Actually, yes, some probably will, but it's going to depend on the label, isn't it? I'm going to guess that artist-owned labels, a la Mailboat Records, are going to get a fair amount to the artists. In point of fact, Mailboat has some albums which have only been available through the iTunes music store so far, although they're going to be released on physical media by month's end.
I'm not dissing your point, but it's not Apple's fault--or for that matter, Tower Records' fault, or any other place selling songs on either digital or physical media--if artists aren't being paid very well by their publishers. Increasingly, artists are opting out of the broken major-label system, and while I'm sure most of them aren't doing substantially better, the chances are that most of them aren't doing any worse.
And that's one advantage that Apple does potentially give independent labels that places like Tower don't: equal footing.
I'm under no illusions about Apple doing this out of a sense of noble goodness, but so what? The entire recording industry "as we know it" may well be changing--but it's a sea change, not a sudden cataclysmic shift, as independent artist-owned labels find ways to get better distribution, taking advantage of new technology in ways the major labels can't or won't. If Apple remains open to independent labels and opens further (as they've clearly started to), they're going to be a force for this change, not an impediment to it.
I don't know where people are getting the idea that you need an iPod if you have iTunes. I've been using a Nomad IIc flash-player, and iTunes recognizes it and works with it through the USB interface just fine. Is this some FUD or what?
Not to rain on the parade here, because the CD Baby deal is still awesome. Here's how it works. Artists are getting 91% of what CD Baby gets from the iTunes Music Store(iTMS). In general, Apple gets 34 cents from each 99 cent track, leaving CD Baby with 65 cents.
65 cents * 91% = 59 cents to the artist.
Now the artist has to pay CD Baby $40 up front to process a CD. So the artist starts out $40 in the hole. After selling 68 songs on iTMS the artist has made back the $40 and goes into the black. Since a CD probably has around 11 tracks on it, that is 6 CDs worth of songs. Not bad at all.
So iTMS and CD Baby absolutely rocks for an independent artist. It's almost definitely better than going the conventional route of getting a major label to press CDs and promote you.
Sapere aude!