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Napster Sells 5 Million Songs
mattmcal writes "CNet reports that Napster has already sold 5 million songs. The number is impressive despite lagging behind Apple which maintains a 56% market share according to SiliconValley.com. The integration with portable devices must play a key role in the download volume which Apple has also developed for the mini iPod."
Are these 5 million indivually-packaged 99 cent songs, or are they including songs shipped out under subscription plans as "sales?"
If HP had stayed by Napster's side, I wonder how much more successful things would have been... It is good to see more companies adopting online music downloading for a price, while the RIAA campaigns against it, however it would be nice to have some stiff compatition against iTunes. Remember, competition is a good thing..
Since Napster has a subscription-based service in addition to selling individual songs for a fixed price, what does "5 million songs sold" mean? TFA is useless for this. Are they counting the songs that people download under the monthly-subscription model as songs? If so, it's not quite as impressive, no?
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
You know, I don't care as much who comes out ahead in the online music store wars, just as long as they are seen as a viable alternative to purchasing shiny plastic discs at the mall.
I just got an iPod mini on Friday and was playing around with iTunes. I NEVER intended to pay for digital music, and always expected I would just get it from Kazaa, etc. But when I saw how easy Apple makes it to buy music, I was hooked. I spent about $35 on music, and this is someone who buys 1, maybe 2 cds a year. Things are only looking better from here.
"Gorog said he resists comparisons with other subscription services because of incongruities in the way subscriber numbers are reported. But he expects the business will mature as users realize it's cheaper to pay a flat fee for access to 500,000 tracks than to pay $1 a song."
It's important to note that you still have to pay if you want to burn a song to a CD or otherwise use it outside of your computer. You do, however, get to use the song on up to three computers. Just a point of clarification because the article might lead one to believe that for a subscription fee you get unlimited downloads to use as you please and you really don't.
Keep Smilin'!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
More importanly, how many of these songs *don't* suck!
Yes, this is Humor!
I sincerely wish Apple would do something like this, espescially since I believe they would save a bit on credit-card processing fees (see one of my earlier posts).
They could even do this without cluttering up the iTMS interface by keeping the same "buy song" button. Just have any songs bought be charged against pre-purchased credit before it goes to your credit card on file.
- Neil Wehneman
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
A couple-few of those points aren't a problem (at least with iTunes)
Each song may well be $0.99, but a full album is most often $9.99.
You do get artwork. It appears right there in iTunes. Not tried it, but you can most likely copy & paste (or just drag) it to save/print it. There's a host of programs (including AppleScripts for iTunes on the Mac) which makes automating that a breeze.
The format's lossy, true. It's up to you if you can't possibly stand less than 44,100/16-bit.
The extras is a good point. But then I don't see online music stores as replacements for real CDs, just complimentary.
If I want to share purchased music with friends, I create the playlist of my eeeeeevil DRM music, and click Burn. I can hand over the CD physically, or ISO it or re-rip it for sending electronically.
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Did each song generate 0.99$ or are these from the University contracts allowing all students to download at will. This is a huge difference. Does anybody have the contract details of the University deals? Is it a blanket fee or reduced charge per song? If students get 'free' unlimitted downloads and are all on T1/T3 lines, of course, 5e6 songs are easily downloaded. This is not surprising.
Hey, leave comments about my mother out of this!
You say "converted" like you need to choose between the two. What is the problem with buying full physical CD albums for when you want the whole she-bang, and going to iTunes when you want a one-shot song you heard on the radio for a buck? Physical CDs and digital music are not mutually exclusive, friend.
Perhaps some accounting type can shed some light on how so much money can be spent on a market that, for the foreseeable future, is only going to generate a million or so after royalties. Haven't we left magic money fairies behind us in the dot com bust? Or are the respected economists of the 80's back to haunt us.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I never thought I would see the words apple and 56% market share in the same sentence.
Don't fool yourself into thinking CDs have 'full dynamic range' of sound. CDs are a compromise, just like anything else. No, they don't have lossy compression, but they do have limited range. While the AAC files on Apple's music store use lossy compression, it's a much better technology than the 10 year old mp3 format -- and the recordings are made from the original tapes (they are not CD rips).
Recording sound is all about compromise. Don't base your judgment of one format over another based on a single word like 'lossy'. Listen to a few songs on the music store and let your ears be the judge.
Usually I like to interject my own thoughts, but I will let the numbers speak for themselves:
4/28/2003 - iTunes Music Store for Mac launches
5/5/2003 - iTMSfM sells 1 millionth song
5/14/2003 - iTMSfM sells 2 millionth song
7/22/2003 - iTMS sells 6.5 millionth song
10/2003 - Napster launches
10/2003 - 300,000 Napster 1st week sales / 1.5MM iTMS sales same week
10/2003 - iTMS for Windows launchs (~13MM songs sold to date)
12/9/2003 - iTMS sells 20 millionth song
12/16/2004 - iTMS sells 25 millionth song (2.5MM/mo.)
2/2004 - Napster sells 5 millionth song (1.25MM/mo.)
On the bottom 1/3 of this page is a chart and analysis of the numbers too.
WARNING: My two cents -
Interesting that while Apple's numbers are much higher than Napsters', and Apple had to overcome the initial proof of concept that it would even work, so many REMAIN critical of the service.
Interesting still is that those same critics won't even spend a few dollars to give iTMS a *TRY* before they ink their mal-informed pens.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I keep seeing this over and over. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Napster does have a hardware mp3 player. Samsung makes it, but it carries the Napster name, and you can bet they get a piece of each sale.
The "problem" with CD's is the 44.1 K sample rate. A 22KHz sound wave only gets represented by two bits, and with many of the crappy early digital encoders from the 80s, it might not even be sampled from alternate peaks of the wave.
Of course, the typical American geek's hearing pretty much ends around 16 KHz (at best), so you could do as CD zealots do, and insist that anything above that frequency doesn't really matter... except it does, because of the way it colors overtones, which are what gives most sounds their timbre. If you put a typical music-lover in a booth and make them listen to a double-blind test between a live microphone feed of a singer with piano accompaniment, and the same live feed where everything above, oh... say 17 KHz is filtered out, they will spot the difference.
However, most of people's concerns about the compromise of "the digital sound" turned out to be unfounded. Early CD players (and some of the cheaper ones today) sounded too bright and tinny as a result of inferior D/A conversion algorhythms.
When an LP is "cut", the low-frequency waves are dialed way down in amplitude, because otherwise you would have a grove that moves outside the stylus's range of motion! A pre-amp in the turntable (based on an industry standard established by the RIAA) boosts the bass back up again. Unfortunately, this electronic equalization results in massive, boomy, slightly unnatrual bass. Through the 70s, the stereos which did the best job of tweaking LP sources to sound natural gained the reputation of being the best playback equipment. Listening to a good-condition LP on a top-notch 70s "hi-fi" stereo is an extremely rewarding experience.
When CD players arrived in the early 80s, the same stereos that played back LP recordings with a "warm, rich" sounded bright, harsh, and shrill when playing back the same recordings on CD.
Over the years, better logic, better error-correction, and better playback components (as well as better digital encoding in studios) have all resulted in CD's that sound every bit as good as LP's.
In the late 80s and early 90s I was a total LP bigot, but to not change my position these days would be ignoring the evidence given by my own ears. Hearing "Dark Side of the Moon" on a $300 Rotel CD player through high-quality speakers is every bit as satisfying as hearing the LP on a $4000 air-baring, laser-guided turntable, if not more so.
So yea, CD's are not a bad compromise at all.
However, 99% of the time I'm listening to music, it's either on a portable player, in my car, or at my computer desk. In those environments, AAC is not only good enough, it's very difficult to notice the difference between it and the CD.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Been there done that.... trashed a box after downloading a few songs. The music wouldnt even synch to the iPod or back from. Couldnt use an iPod extractor to get the music back to the computer.
I emailed Apple iTMS and explained the situation. They tweaked some settings and my music was available for download and reauthorizing onto machines free of charge.
iTMS support said they normally do not support such a request, but since they responded within 1 hour of the original email request with a positive response, and within the another hour to mysecond email requesting that users should be able to deauthenticate machines from within iTMS, I think they would be open to assisting us blockheaded users.
This is not 'news'. It is a slick piece of PR from a desperate company. Since the launch of pay-per-song Napster, the parent company Roxio has seen its share price decline from $11 to $3.50, a 68% decline. Yesterday the stock hit a 52-week low (amid a generally happy NASDAQ environment). For this company to generate a mere $5mm in revenues in 3 months can only be described as an unmitigated failure, as the market price of ROXI clearly demonstrates.
/. need to treat corporate PR with a healthier degree of skepticism.
The editors of
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=roxi