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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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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.
>> 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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 $12+.
What possible advantage is there to this crippleware?
It's not so bad. Burn the AAC files to a CD, and rip them into MP3. Voila. (As for sound quality, I've done this and have zero complaints.)
-W
All unfair meta-mods are now being meta-meta-modded as retarded.
do we like or hate the RIAA today? Keep in mind, buying iTunes songs is supporting the people that subpeona grandmas and 12 year-old girls. iTunes sounds attractive, but I hate to give anything to people this greedy and corrupt.
80 cents to the record companies who have done essentially NOTHING except allow a form of sales that requires them to produce no physical product.
Well, how else will their lawyers get paid? Settlements from 12 year-old girls and college students only go so far...
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[/Sarcasm]
Been three days. Mostlikely, the number of ITunes downloads will slow down, but the buys should keep going fairly well.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
At one point I heard Mr. Jobs discussing the backend, and yes... the Xserve, Xserve RAID and the venerable MacOS X Server are all the behind-the-scenes puppetmasters for iTunes Music Store.
:)
Of course, Apple also uses Quicktime (once again, their own product), likely coupled with some in-house custom app to do the encoding and maintenace of the store, so you could say that when using iTunes, you're using Apple software from end to end, save for your OS if you happen to be stuck on a Windows box.
Of course for me on this 17" PowerBook, it's Apple to Apple from a to Z.
From the encoding of the track, to the storage, to the serving of the data to the client that receives it and the playback engine that processes it... all Apple hardware and software.
Few other companies in the world build "the whole widget", and even fewer make it all work so wonderfully.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
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
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.
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.
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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.
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
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?
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."