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Apple Announces 25 Million Song Downloads
Tweder writes "On Apple's iTunes site, Apple has announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded over 25 Million songs from the iTunes Music Store. It seems the launch of the ITMS on the Windows platform has boosted sales tremendously." I suppose this is where I am expected to say something along the lines of, "I thought the recording industry said that this business model wouldn't work, that people won't pay for what they can download for free?" So, there you go.
The problem with Itunes is it takes the flawed recording industry and extends their monopoly.
Guess what? The iTunes Music Store has hundreds of thousands of songs from independent labels. Labels that are not members of the RIAA. Including many labels that give their artists much better deals.
I'm a jazz fan, so one of my favorite labels is Concord Records, with such artists as Poncho Sanchez and Karrin Allyson. Go ahead, log on and listen to them, you might enjoy it. And supporting them doesn't support the RIAA!
RIAA Radar is a neat site that lets you search for your favorite artist or label and find out whether they're RIAA-free or not.
40% of the purchase goes to iTunes, 30% goes to the label (which may or may not be an RIAA member), 10% goes to an intermediary middleman (if one exists) such as Amazon.com or AOL, 8% goes to the publisher (I think this is ASCAP, but I'm not really sure), and the remaining 12% goes to the artist. According to the article on Business 2.0 entitled The MP3 Economy: How labels and artists divvy up your MP3 dollar that these statistics were taken from, "twelve percent is average, but successful bands often hammer out better contracts. In many major-label contracts, charges for 'packaging' and promotional copies are subtracted from the artist's cut, leaving the talent with a measly 8 percent. BMG, Universal, and Warner have announced plans to do away with such deductions for digital downloads."
-Matt
Duke '05
iTunes is currently having 1.5 million tracks downloaded from it's store each week. This # will rise even more right after the holidays due to everyone claiming their iTunes Music Store Gift Certificates. That doesn't even include all the iPods they have sold thus far. Most places like CompUSA are already out of stock of the 20-30GB iPods. So this to me is sign that iTunes Music sales will probably spike right after Christmas. Right now the big rumor about the 4th Gen iPods which are coming in Jan. will not just include the normal bigger storage compacity but a ePod line in the $100-200 range. Apple is already said next yr they will open a Japan, Australia, European, and Canada music store for next yr. I and alot of people think that some these stores will open in Jan. while the rest will open about 3-4 months down the road. This would cause very large influx of downloads per week. Also starting in Feb. Pepsi will be doing it's 100 million iTunes give away which will definitely make Apples overall #'s go up and up. Right now it's been rumored that Pepsi will also be giving away 600 iPods with Pepsi logo iSkins and each will be #'ed. I believe Apple will hit 100 million by Jan. and if the McDonalds promo iTunes deal goes through those #'s will just continue to increase. So no I don't see it slowing down. On a side note it's nice to see Winamp 5 guys went with AAC from Dolby. Which just goes to show the AAC std is catching on.