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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."
looking at the napster site i can see why it is so important that itunes be the standard. (check out the partners bit)
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Apple's innovative and patent-pending online "Allowance" feature which allows parents to automatically deposit funds into their kids' iTunes Music Store account every month;
Yet another worthless, obvious patent. Sigh.
Praise be to Apple and Steve Jobs for figuring out that there is a better way to distribute music in this day and age.
/. have an indie band, and have you tried to deal with iTunes? Any experiences/comments would be most welcome...
Once I get my finances situated, I'm off to download iTunes and get started. It's about time that someone realized that yes, there is in fact a good online music business model.
Now, how to go about getting them to sell my band's music on the store? Since we don't have a label, the split of sales would be a bit different, I'd assume there would have to be a different deal structure worked out. Does anyone else here on
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I dont think I will use the iTMS for full albums. I am still to attached to tangible cd's and such. They are just nice. But it has proven PERFECT for one hit wonders and such....
I used to rip all my cd's and then go on gnutella to grab the few tracks that I don't own but listen to all the time, or single songs from artists who I generally dislike (i.e. Lose Yourself by Eminem) - now I just buy those songs for 99cents from iTMS, avoiding the "must buy a full cd" syndrome that always stopped me before, and suddenly I own every song on my computer for just a few bucks.
In fact, the iTMS taught me something that I hopey the RIAA will learn one of these days: Good Karma is fun.
If you look at BullyMag's estimates for profits of iTunes: 65 cents in royalty payments. Also bandwidth, media delivery, salaries, credit card fees etc etc is another 10 cents per song. This leaves about 24 cents per song. 24 cents x 1 million downloads = $240,000. That's just from the windows downloads. If you calculate all 14 million downloads, that's $3.36 million.
Easy to access previews. A friend of mine recommended a band to me. Since I just downloaded iTunes, I pulled up there album and listen to a few songs. It's only 30 seconds, but it was quicker than finding a full song on Kazaa and hoping that the song on Kazaa is properly labeled.
Not only that but this propreitary service only lets you play your songs on an Ipod, no third party players supported.
You can also burn to CD, enabling you to use any Discman or other portable CD player.
On National Public Radio a representative from Apple was talking about the fee structure. 99 cents per song is distributed thusly:
- 80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
- 19 cents is split between the artist and Apple.
And yet they keep quoting the 10 Million Downloads In the first 3 months statistic and now the 1,000,000 song statistic. This means that for those 1 million songs the record companies made $800,000 and that the artist and Apple have to share $190,000.So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing. Of course Apple has to promote the iPod, they have to pay for the software development, the bandwidth, the data storage etc and they have to split their share with the artist (who once again seem to be considered a line item expense rather than the people who produce the art and product)
Don't fool youself into thinking this is supporting the artist. The record companies are just as corrupt as ever.
do we like or hate the RIAA today? Keep in mind, buying iTunes songs is supporting the people that subpeona grandmas and 12 year-old girls. iTunes sounds attractive, but I hate to give anything to people this greedy and corrupt.
Anybody remember when Jack Valenti said this:
Permission to be smug, sir!
"Derp de derp."
Don't know if its been mentioned or not, but those million people also installed the latest version of QuickTime along with iTunes (assuming they installed it). I gotta wonder if that's the biggest jump Apple's ever had in QuickTime penetration in the Windows market.