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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)
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Expect iPod sales to soar into the holidays. Apple made something very difficult seem very simple to the end user, and now they're being rewarded.
From my understanding, because at macrumors.com, some people were a little confused, is that the Windows version of iTunes had 1 million downloads and as a result iTMS, had sold 1 million songs in 3.5 days. They wern't specifying specifically that Windows users downloaded 1 million songs.
>> 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.
but if you read it carefully it just says the 1M are "by iTunes users," i.e. including existing Mac users.
one of the problems I have with the service is that album pricing can be a bit uneven. There are too many albums (ex: NWA's greatest hits) that have an "extra" song or two added to them that then are not available for the $9.99 download because, well, you'd be getting MORE than just the album. (In the NWA case that's BS, but whatever.) Also, new albums (such as Snoop's Paid the Cost to be the Boss) don't always sell for $9.99. When I went to buy Cost a couple of months ago, it was $17 or $18. That being said, I've probably purchased $80 or so worth of music since iTunes 4 came out for Mac. Best purchase so far: Placido Domingo's album of Mariachi music.
Actually there is a good reason to click. They measure interest in the story (in part) by hits to their PR.
Come play Moral Decay!
I downloaded iTunes on Wednesday and used it to buy an album that night. Even though I'm on 56k dial-up, it downloaded flawlessly (although it did take about 4 hours, as I expected). I have to say that I'm pretty impressed - for a free jukebox program, it's really high quality. It still has some issues and bugs that could be polished out of it, but overall it's a well designed and easy to use program that I have no major complaints about. It's heads and tails above Windows Media Player 9, and a better jukebox than Winamp (although I think Winamp is still a better standalone player). If Jobs can play his cards right, this could be big.
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news
not sure what you're talking about...
I've found 5 albums
"Raising Hell", "King of Rock", "Back from Hell",
"Run-D.M.C.", "Run-DMC: Greatest Hits"
I hope every one isn't posted to the front page like when iTMS first came out.
Seriously, I think iTMS for WIndows is going to be much bigger than most people have given it credit for. M$ 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.
slashdot -- old news for nerds, now with twice the repetition! Now with twice the repetition!
I don't think saving $2 on an album is that great of a bargain when the compression is lossy and you factor in the cost of disc and jewel case.
Quicktime and iTunesHelper are both loaded at computer startup and happily sit in the background, guzzling memory (iTunesHelper is 3 MB, for example). Does this crap really need to run when I'm not using it?
Arbitrary restrictions on burning a playlist (10 burns, then you have to mess with it to burn more) seems a bit silly.
That said, I do like the store browsing, and getting 30sec of good quality samples on the music is pretty nice, although I'd prefer full song at low quality (might be a problem with Audiobooks, but they've proven they can differentiate the two.)
At this point, I'm going to stick with buying used and ripping the stuff into Windows Media Player. The interface is better, it doesn't automatically suck memory when I'm not using it, and the visualization runs at more than 3fps.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
Troll?
I mean, sure good analysis and point about bandwidth. But hey, iTunes music store is as much about exposure for Apple and selling iPods etc, as it is about profit.
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
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Well for only a few days that ain't half-bad, I really love the system they've got going in the iTunes Music store, I dun think Napster is really gonna use it's "huge market potential because of brand recognition" as much as ppl think, more like "wth, you have to PAY??", unless napster pulls some very nice stuff with their client, iTunes should stay ahead of the game(hopefully).
only wish they would break the country boundary (yes I know that's not easy)
You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect. Miyamoto Musashi
Is something wrong with mine? It keeps telling me it can't connect to the store because it is busy.
I am over here... now I am back over here!
The more I think about it, the more clever it seems.
So you can get iTunes for free. Ho-friggin-ray. And you can rip MP3's to your hearts content, so they work with *all* MP3 players.
Wait - Windows Media Player rips to WMA by default. Oh, it does MP3's, but you have to pay more to get it to work better than crap.
Ok, so what. Yeah, it's a good app.
And it lets you burn CD's - music and data, right from the playlist.
For free.
And all the other machines in the house - they can stream off that, so I just put all my MP3's on one box, put iTunes on the other computers, and stream from there.
Ok, that is kind of cool. Check out the online store. You know, I've only wanted to buy 1 song off this album. Cool - I just did. Only cost $1 - that's not too bad.
And I can burn it to a music CD, or put it on 2 more machines.
Then comes the fall. You know, I wanted to get an MP3 player anyway. For some insane reason (you had an additional $300), you get an iPod.
Don't need a Mac, and it works just fine with your Windows and iTunes.
But hold on - turns out you can use this iPod thing with digital camera and upload the pictures to the iPod, and from there to the computer. Oh, but you need a Mac for that.
You know, what do I use my computer for? Email, a few games - huh, that Aspyr company is porting over the ones I really like anyway -
Man, and this other stuff comes free with a Mac - a movie editor, a browser that blocks popup ads by default, there's less virus problems -
Hm....
Now, I don't think everybody will consider gong to the Mac just because of the iTunes store.
But having "hip 20-to-30-somethings" tell us how switching to the Mac is "the bomb" really didn't work.
So Steve Jobs is changing tactics: Go ahead, take a bite of this apple. It's free! It will just give you knowledge! Or, barring that, a pretty kick ass music player!
Next thing people know, they realize that they've been living naked under Windows for a long time, and start to make themselves aprons from leaves.
In this case, by plucking them from the Apple tree.
I'm curious to see what will happen from here. Remember: Apple doesn't need to dominate the market. It already makes a profit with its products now, and it happy to do so.
This will just give it the chance to make more profit - and maybe show people what they've been missing along the way.
Of course, this is just my opinion - I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Except that it's totally different. The dot-com days were typified by huge numbers of venture capitalists, stupid ideas, and fly-by-nite products. Apple is a huge company (yeah, yeah, they're dying just like *BSD, we know, we know) with a lot of backing, and they have other products for sale which they do make a profit on.
Also, how do you know they're not making a profit from iTunes? I haven't seen any figures on what the licensing costs. I'd imagine they must be making _some_ profit on it - they're not stupid. They don't need to make a huge profit, since like I said before, they have other sources of income (AlBooks, anyone?). They can break even and still be in good financial shape. But I suspect they're not even close to being in the red.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
They make about $0.33 profit out of every $0.99 sale. That goes to pay for servers, development and, of course bandwidth. But the iTunes Music Store is also a huge ad for an iPod, which they make a lot on too. Apple is doing just fine with the money they're making from the music store. According to NPR their stock price has doubled between the launch of the iTMS and the Windows release.
Errr... I mean Apple and BSD are dead.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Apple is doing the reverse. Selling the "software" (or music in this case) for cheap while (hopefully) profiting on sales of iPods and iPod accessories.
If I don't have a mc, windows, or an ipod, am I left out in the cold?
I know. I tried to install iTunes on my IBM PC XT, but couldn't jam the CD into the 5 1/4" drive. Insensitive clods!
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.
It looks like people do want to pay for their music... if only you'd damn well make it reasonably attractive for them to do so.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
So whats your point? There are certain stores that sell an item at almost no profit just to get customers in the door to buy other things. In the case of apple. It means that millions of songs being put out in the AAC format. Combine this with the iPod and iTunes and people in the windows world are using apple products. Makes it that much eaiser to lure people over to apple.
Apple readily admits that they don't intend to make money from this. from an MSNBC article: "But Jobs contends that in the long run the competition will boil down to Apple and Microsoft. "Between the license fees and the credit-card charges, there's no money in online music," he says. For Apple, the payoff comes in selling the iPod players that work hand in hand with the store: more than a million have been sold, and in the last quarter, Apple moved 336,000 units." link is here
Each month, Apple comes out with some sort of announcement that still blows me away. MacWorld after MacWorld they have new products to support this digital hub lifestyle. When will it end???
How many of you scoffed when Jobs mentioned the "digital hub"? I did. "WTF is a digital hub? The Mac already does all of these things he's talking about. Simple ways to work with your digital camera, for adding new hardware, etc" Yet they come out with the iPod, a non-computer/non-software item. And it sells like nuts. Then they sell it to Windows users. And now with iTunes Music Service, it's become quite evident Apple is interested in more than being simply a computer manufacturer. People scoffed at the idea, but one million songs in a few days is nothing to laugh at. Can't wait to see what happens to iPod sales (and conversely iTMS sales) in the holiday season.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
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.
No, sorry, my bad. It wasn't Apple. It was me. I admit it. I was the one who bought those songs. I just wanted to see if their servers could withstand a vicious one-man slashdotting...
It can - apparently the iTunes server's not running Windows. But I'll try again tonight, this time with my friend Chris buying the same songs simultaneously. Then I'll get Greg and Dave to help me buy whole albums at a time, and pretty soon, Steve Jobs will crumble in terror and BEG us to stop our vicious assault on their site!
Steve Jobs, I warned you - I've got my VISA, and I'm ready to
take.
you.
down.
You didn't care when I started buying iPod after iPod in an attempt to exhaust your assembly line workers in a one-man iPod Slashdotting. Well this is different. This time, I'm serious and I've upped my VISA limits. Your site is toast. Get ready to rumble!
Signed, your pal
Hackmaster Fred
Apple can maintain its Music Store on break even until hell freezes over, because for Apple this is just an extra.
Dude, your remark should make Roxio, Real, and Buy.com shake with fear. They are the ones with the dot-com era business plan.
For Apple, iTunes Win is merely trojan for three Apple-invented technologies: Quicktime, Rendesvouz (actually and open source standard), and Fair Play.
Look at this as an innovative marketing campaign. It is clear that Apple is not getting rich out of Music sales (at least not until they reach 1 billion in annual sales).
Actually, they have sold more than a million songs. And many of the early downloads were probably Mac users like myself putting it on a windows laptop just to use Rendezevous. I would not end up buying from that Windows machine, ever.
They should have went with Coke. Now, if I want to get free iTunes music, I'll have to patronize Pepsico... blah.
I agree. This editorial at ars technica looks at some of the points you bring up.
has anyone had problems burning to cd (audio, data, mixed) in windows? i didnt realize this until after i bought an ablum, that itunes uses its own software to burn cds instead of users choice (boohoo i want nero). it initializes the cd and buffers the songs to burn and then exits with a '4000' error.
I'm not sure if you are trolling, because we've been over this many times before, but I'll go over it again.
The protected AAC files (.m4p) downloaded from iTMS can be burned an unlimited number of times to recordable CDs. There is, of course, no protection on standard audio CDs, so you are free to rerip to MP3/OGG/your-format-du-jour.
Expecting legal downloads to ever be completely absent of DRM is completely ridiculous. It will simply never happen if the big 5 record labels are going to license their music. So, the best you can hope for is DRM that actually repects your usage rights. This is exactly what Apple's system, which is called FairPlay, was designed to do.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
A million already despite the Microsoft rep trying to discredit the service. I wonder if anyone listens to Microsoft's opinions nowadays anyways.
Moof.
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.
Akamai uses piles of linux boxen. There are 3 1U VA made machines at my ISP, and we have an entire rack of 2U machines at the U of MN.
you can do that without buying a thing, which is what I have been doing, which is why instead of buying 4 songs i bought 3 albums and one song.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
They don't support my extremely obscure operating system!
Yes, folks, Linux on the desktop is obscure.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
It's commonly known that apple makes about $.10 per song download. Apple's profits are at about $100,000 for 4 days, and if they keep this rate that would make it roughly $9.1 million a year.
While not a landslide for a company like Apple, it is still respectable and probably takes care of the overhead.
Where apple makes a killing is on the sales of the ipod music player. Expect sales of these to go through the roof now that there is a windows client (especially with Christmas around the corner) and it's not unreasonable to expect them to sell 3 million a year.
If Apple were to only make $34 profit a unit, that would mean an additional $100 million a year profit.
Add to this the untangible values gained from increased brand recognition and respect (leading to increased Mac sales), which in turn leads to a steadily increasing stock price, it is indeed easy to see that there is lots of sales and profit.
Congratulations Steve, you have once again shown your cunning.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
My biggest issue with all of these per-song services (iTunes, MusicMatch, the upcoming new Napster) is that you are paying relatively full price for lower quality.
.flac versions when you purchase a song or album.
I much prefer Magnatune("we are not evil") who allows you to download wav and lossless
My second problem is that my tastes are rather eclectic, and using iTunes to find albums to my taste hasn't been working. For instance, I'll pick an album that I really like, and look at the "people who buy this album also buy" and discover I don't like any of their suggestions. But I don't buy much popular music, so it may work for other people.
Related, the 30-second browsing is often not enough for me. Supposedly the new Napster per-song service will allow you to preview the whole song. I know that I bought some Magnatune album recently because I could browse the whole album.
-- Herder of Cats
Probably because iTunes isn't a file sharing service. In sheer terms of quantity, iTunes doesn't hold a candle to KaZaA, but then you're dealing with 800 copies of a single song, 250 of which are "demo" red herring tracks put out by RIAA lackeys, 200 copies that are 56kbps, and 100 copies that seem to be encoded after having been recorded on a VoIP headset from a clock radio across the room...
;)
The iTMS guarantees consistant quality, which is something that can't be said of P2P systems. iTMS also comes with additional information, you can get samples before you download a song - fast and convenient, unlike in KaZaA.
Overall, iTunes gives you a good interface for using the music, a consistant distribution system with a quality guarantee you don't get for free, and it's getting better. Sure, it won't appeal to audiophiles or the DRM-obsessed who are unfamiliar with the word "equitable", but then very little does.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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.
The Ars Technica article missed the obvious other solutions, by presenting the closed choice of "either AAC or WMA" DRM.
1. No DRM on the stupid file at all.
2. Use an open standard DRM technology (existing, new, or open its own AAC DRM scheme M4P).
MORTAR COMBAT!
there's a ogg plug-in that's been available for the quicktime and itunes on os x for quit some time and I doubt it will take long for this to come out for the pc version now that it's available. I also wouldn't doubt that itunes will at some point in the future support wma, either natively or through a plug-in. for christ's sakes, this thing hasn't even been out a week and everyone's bitching about what it doesn't do.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
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.
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.
No, no. You mean BSD is dying and Apple is beleaguered.
Record companies are a version of loan sharks: They loan you baskets full of money and then hold all your paychecks until that money is repaid. It's the artist's fault if thy decide to spend the profits off their next 2 albums down at the Ferrari dealership.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
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.
Well, how else will their lawyers get paid? Settlements from 12 year-old girls and college students only go so far...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
[/Sarcasm]
Been three days. Mostlikely, the number of ITunes downloads will slow down, but the buys should keep going fairly well.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
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
1. Yes, iTunes Music Store uses DRM. It is a simple (and admittedly regrettable) fact that right now no major label will allow digital distribution of their content w/o DRM. To Apple's credit, they have negotiated the least restrictive DRM scheme out there, except for that of eMusic, which sells DRM-free MP3 files.(And is the service I use for that reason.)
2. iTunes != iTMS. Once again: iTunes is not (just) an online music store. It is primarily a jukebox program. That's what I use it for -- I wouldn't buy from iTMS, since my player doesn't support AAC and I don't much care for DRM either.
3. MusicMatch is a terrible piece of software. Ditto RealOne. WMP is decent, but it scares me. A lot of people think Winamp is the bee's knees, and I admire it and its developers, but I've never quite cottoned to its playlist-oriented (rather than library-oriented, for lack of a better term) interface. So iTunes works for me, as an MP3 jukebox. YMMV. I guess Windows users do like choice, after all.
:wq
If you like the company or not it is hard to deny that Apple has done almost everything right. In the last couple of years they have:
1. Adopted open standards
2. Used and contributed to open-source programs
3. Brought music to the net (legally and successfully)
4. Brought their hardware up to x86 speeds
5. Brought UNIX to the desktop
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Isn't it amazing what happens when you innovate instead of regulate?
I'm sure all the people who purchased songs did so because they were in fear that the RIAA was going to sue them, not because Apple has heavily promoted a new way to conviently acquire just the music they want.
Score: Technology 1, Lawyers 0
Subscriptions are really the way to go with Audible. For $20/month you get any two books on the store, whereas buying them individually you will pay that much for just one new release. Just use the individual purchases for the $5-10 classic titles.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
And what happens when everybody who wants an Ipod has one? Wasn't that Palm's problem, market saturation? It's not like Ipods have a 1 or 2 year upgrade cycle, where they'll have repeat buyers. Those 1st gen 5GB owners might be looking to upgrade, but the rest are good enough to keep for a long time, or at least 3-4 years until the rechargable battery wears out.
I read somewhere that s)ome artists have said that due to the way it's licensed, they make more money off of a single track sold through the iTMS, then they do through a hard copy sale of one of their older albums. (Sorry I don't have the link to back this up - search the mac rumor site archives if you're interested). Keep in mind that Apple's not responsible for paying the artists, the label is. You may be interested in researching how the music industry currently works, before spreading FUD about a new technology that goes about selling music.
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.
On 8 November, the $9.99-a-month unlimited download service will be limited to a maximum of 40 downloads each month. Subscribers can increase that figure to 65 downloads a month, but that will cost them $14.99. A monthly payment of $50 will buy them 300 downloads each month.
That's under $.25 per track, for MP3s with NO DRM. A better (legal) deal cannot be had. Plus, it has lots of independent stuff not found elsewhere.
:wq
yeah, the search engine is something apple needs to improve. --crappy on suggesting near hits. so, i search for partial names (e.g., run) and then sort the results by artist/song/album if need be.
And man my wife is gonna be pissed when she sees the Amex Platinum bill. What could I do? I'm trying to keep my Apple stock share up...! It *seemed* reasonable to do at the time....
Glad I had lot of CDRs lying around....
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
You're new here, aren't you? :-)
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
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.
1m songs x .99 = $990,000 - $650,000 (label royalties) = $340,000. Subtract HR, bandwidth costs, etc, etc... and they are not making much at all. But, and it's a very important but, they do get to book a million dollars of revenue in a 3 day period which is pretty impressive.
1) Apple blew it. They came out with iTunes for Windows too late. Ha ha hah! Buymusic.com is already there first. The vaporous Dell and Microsoft services are much better on paper than than this pathetic Apple offering.
2) AAC? Beh. Give me the open standard. Give me WMP! Support standards, Apple!
3) Black turtlenecks? Who wears black turtlenecks?
4) 99 cents a song? What, do you think I'm RICH?! Give me songs for free. Artists don't get much money when they go through the iTMS anyway, so why should I give the artists anything at all? Answer me that, man.
5) They're just trying to sell iPods. So that means that even if I get the iTunes app for free and use it, Apple is screwing me over. Yeah, they're screwing me over. That's it.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Heh.
:-)
It's listed as Run-DMC.
There are 9 Albums. You can find them by browsing.
Why "Run DMC" or "DMC" come up with nothing, when it's named Run-DMC, seems to be a limitation.
If you really care
These sites have been available for years now. MP3 finder, grammy.ru - many of them. All operating completely within the laws of the country that hosts them (Russia) and in cooperation with many of the very same labels (Universal, Sony, etc) who have refused, for years, to cooperate with american web companies in offering the very same product package.
Notice how we never hear about lawsuits or the RIAA threatening to take down these "international" sites? Why do you think that is? They don't dare talk about them and let Americans know they can buy mp3 music online at a dime a pop... or even get many popular picks absolutely free, and completely legal.
It's fascinating how they can continue to make money in a country where "pirated music" outnumbers legal copies on store shelves 2:1, but swear that offering DRM free download services in the US would put them out of business.
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?
That's under $.25 per track, for MP3s with NO DRM. A better (legal) deal cannot be had. Plus, it has lots of independent stuff not found elsewhere.
All true, but their material can be quite uneven and they tend not to have big-name artists (or only early recordings that were buried in record labels' vaults for very good reasons). Therefore, the attraction of eMusic was the possibility of downloading stuff speculatively, without thinking of a ticking download meter.
Nevertheless, I was willing to give them a chance to show what they could do under the new model. However, downloads (which already lost considerably in reliability and convenience when they switched to their proprietary download manager earlier this year) have turned to complete garbage since their announcement. It takes dozens of restarts to get a download now, and sometimes the download is falsely reported as correct when in fact a zero length or truncated file was downloaded.
Under these circumstances, I don't see much of a future for my eMusic subscription, or for eMusic, for that matter.
"Why don't you steal your stuff like the other slashbots?"
How can I steal my own stuff? After all, it's mine, I wrote it, and I can do whatever the fuck I want to with it, including sharing it with whomever wants it.
Are we sure it wasn't just Cher downloading "Do You Believe" a million times?
From the Apple Q4 conference call:
137,000 iBooks shipped ($154 million)
336,000 iPods shipped ($121 million)
iPods represent almost as much income as iBooks!
Without iTMS for windows!
What will those numbers look like after this Xmas?
Hello?
The iTMS drives sales of iPods.
Apple need not turn a profit on the iTMS.
By Making-The-Whole-Widget (tm) Apple can compete against the likes of Napster, et al on completly different terms.
It fits in with their overall iApps strategy.
What excuses will you have now to keep using Kazaa and so forth? You're always rattling on about how file-traders brave freedom fighters shoving it to the RIAA by avoiding an "obsolete business model," and how record companies should instead embrace Internet file-sharing.
Well, here it is. Have you switched to this excellent, high-quality p2p file-sharing program or are you still leeching off of Kazaa? I think it's a legitimate question, because iTunes is just the tip of the iceberg with this kind of success. I'm very pleased that Apple is leading the charge.
Will you actually stand behind your ideals, or does it turn out that you've just been justifying your guilt for leeching all this time?
"Sufferin' succotash."
My apologies if this has been already covered. It's clear that Apple has made iTunes the loss leader for the iPod. That is, the are bringing people in the door with the downloaded music and then (hopefully) up selling them on iPods (and Macs too). That business model makes sense when you think about the profit margins that the iPods bring. They're making at least $100 on just the low end model and they've sold 1.4 Million total units. Also, it appears that iPod sales have been accelerating since the launch of iTMS. Apple has figured out that if they sale "X" amount of songs they will probably sell "X" amount of iPods. So I think the losses from the music store are chalked up as the just cost of doing business. It looks like the loss leader is the current business model of choice for the online music stores. MusicMatch is doing the same thing (up selling to the Pro version) and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
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.
Oh I know! In fact, this reminds me of those damned crooks at [evil corp]. I order something from them, pay $50 for it, and UPS only sees... what, $2, $3.50 max? I mean, UPS packs, ships, and verifies delivery of everything I ordered. Yet [evil corp] is getting over 90% of the money. And for what? [Evil corp] didn't have to buy planes and trucks to deliver their wares. They didn't even pay for the boxes or the shipping labels. They did NEXT TO NOTHING... except produce the gadgets I ordered.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
Hopefully by that time Apple's found some new "next big thing" to latch on to.
The nice thing, hopefully, about the iTunes Music Store is that once it stops being an active profit-bringer because of the iPods, it still is at least breaking even. So Apple isn't really paying any money for it to run. It's just kind of self-sufficient.
Moreover, even if they don't make any money from it, the iTunes Music Store does good things for apple. It engenders some kind of goodwill, it makes some people who might otherwise write Apple off take them seriously enough as a still-vital company they might look at some of Apple's hardware offerings, it gives Apple something they can point at and say "look at all the revenue passing through the Music Store every month, we're not going anywhere anytime soon".
Perhaps most importantly though if iTunes is adopted in a big way it makes a big logjam on the spread of Windows Media. If someone really loves iTunes, even if they don't like the iPod they'll be more likely to buy an mp3 player than a wmv player. If nothing else, this means that once wma starts trying to take off, people will actually go "wait, this DRM is really stupid" since they've dealt with what is, purely relatively speaking, a more reasonable DRM system (iTunes).
Also, iTunes is a sneakily brilliant and possibly unintentional way of making absolutely certain that almost everyone has a non-Microsoft way of viewing MPEG4s. WMV vs. MPEG4 is likely going to erupt into a rather painful war at some point, and this is MPEG4's big beachhead... how many music players do you think will add AAC as a result of the iTunes store? Maybe not many, but certainly more than there would have been otherwise..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I see people bandying about the claims that re-encoding from lossy to lossy codec gets worse. Of course, it sounds so obvious. But here's my question - hopefully someone can point me to an explanation. If a codec took a WAV file, say, and truly took out only the bits you couldn't hear anyway, why wouldn't you be able to de-compress it to WAV (not the same WAV of course, since it's lossy), and then re-compress it to the exact same file it created the first time - in other words, why can't the codec say "Hey, there's nothing here I can remove, because it's all audible or distinguishable"?
These "intelligently lossy" codecs should be able to be transcoded infinite times without any loss in quality, assuming they had the same definition of "losable data."
I'd like to be educated - it seems like it should be possible with an intelligent codec, yet I've never seen one.
They are definitely making gross profit from iTunes. Assuming they spent shitloads of $$$ on R&D, they might have high depreciation costs and so their operating profit might be negative. Though even with $40 mln investment figure (crazy, isn't it?) that I heard somewhere and 5 year depreciation period they still need to depreciate about 650 thousand per month. And they sell 2.4 mln songs per month to Apple users only, which makes more than that if we ignore the operating costs for the moment (They can't be high, hosting/traffic is cheap, even with lots of free streaming, as Apple gets 1$ per song). In any case, that's simply a matter of time and increasing their sales. But with Windows they must immediately become profitable. And probably very profitable.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
If Microsoft isn't even supporting them why should Apple? Let's be real here.
It costs me less than $0.30 per disc to produce cd's in my home and buying the cd's in quantities of 100.
;)
Now call me crazy but somehow I think it costs the labels who buy their discs in millions a wee bit less to do it, add power bills and salaries for employee's etc (although this could and should be a damn near fully automated process, 3 employees and a shipping crew could do everything to produce the discs for thousands of artists in a week), and let's say that cuts the margin to more like $0.20/disc for them. Now they sell them for $15-20 a cd. Somehow I don't think cd production is their biggest problem, and it's not like they have to look for retailers/distributors either.
Sad though, add the artist's $0.15 to that and it costs the studio $0.15 since the artist is charged for the production costs... most likely charged $0.35/cd, so make it $0 for the studio to produce cd's. Hmmm... I really don't see how the studios care about this one way or the other
Let's see what you got wrong. Let's start with your first point.
Here's the ACTUAL quote from the press release, "Apple(R) today announced that Windows users have downloaded more than one million copies of its new iTunes(TM) for Windows digital jukebox software in just three and a half days since its launch last Thursday, and over one million songs have been purchased and downloaded by iTunes users in the same period"
That also covers your second point. As for your third point, there was absolutely no mention in the story or press release saying X% of the downloads were from Windows users. So you should get YOUR facts straight before you go posting about a story was wrong.
"Apple offers 1 million clues to RIAA; none taken so far."
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
No need for all that hassle, just convert AAC files to MP3s within iTunes:
1. Open iTunes (for Windows).
2. Click on the "Edit" menu and select "Preferences".
3. In the window that appears, click the "Importing" tab.
4. Select "MP3 encoder" from the "Import Using" menu. Select your desired MP3 quality. Click OK to close the window and save your changes.
Now you can right-click any file in your library and select "Convert Selection to MP3" from the contextual menu. Done!
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
One of Apple's spokesmen acknowledged that iTMS didn't make any profit but called it a "trojan horse" to promote iPods and also Quicktime, MPEG4 and AAC. iTMS isn't intended to be a cash cow (at least not at present) but a component in a larger strategy. First and most obviously it drives iPod sales. Secondly, and in the long run more importantly, it will hamper Microsoft from using it's monopoly to dominate media formats the way they currently dominate office document formats.
...albeit for iTunes 3: Article 75451 :-)
Looks like lots of Rio, Nomad, and psa]play devices. Oh, and apparently the iPod too
Thanks,
Peter