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iTMS Europe: 800,000 Tracks In A Week
no_demons writes "In a press release, Apple has announced that the "European" iTunes Music Store has sold 0.8 million tracks in a week, with around 450,000 being sold in the UK alone. According to Steve Jobs other services were shifting only 50,000 tracks a week in Europe before the launch."
AOL UK and Apple have a deal to promote to DSL customers throuhg Keyword: itunes, where customers can download itunes :-)
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
what they don't tell you is that 74% of those downloads were made by Sporty Spice. She d/l'ed thousands of copies of "tell me what you want, what you really, really want" in the hopes of reclaiming some of her former "glory". It's shameful for all Europeans.
Erm, that would be the same Melanie Chisholm who's debut solo album Northern Star went multi-platinum?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
If anyone really cares, this is how it breaks down:
Population of Germany, France and UK: 203,119,530
Population of US: 293,027,571
Which gives us
3.94 downloads per 1000 people for Europe
8.53 downloads per 1000 people for the US
This assumes 800,000 downloads for Gr, Fr, and UK compared to 2.5 mil for the US.
Populations are the 2004 Estimates from The CIA World Factbook
Was that night on the marge of Lake LaBarge I cremated Sam McGee...
When do they start selling your code without paying you for your work?
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
The billing address on your credit card.
As I understand, for a time at least, you could purchase gift certificates with a US credit card and sell/send those to people around the world who could then use them.
I don't now if Apple ever squashed that.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
this has been thoroughly covered by Apple. the iTMS US was making a slight profit as of a few months ago. It's all a matter of volume.
Apple's share of revenue from each $.99 song sale is on the order of a dime as I recall.
While no longer a loss leader for the iPod, iTMS will not be a major source of income for Apple until/unless they get a larger cut of the sale.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I decided to try this myself, you can't buy from the foreign stores. It gives you a message stating that your account is only authorized for purchase in the US.
So, in case anyone else was wondering, there is your answer.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
D'oh, my math was off by a bit because I mis-read the PDF I referenced. Here are more accurate numbers:
If they sell an average of 800,000 songs for the year (unlikely, I think), then that's the equivalent of 3.5 million CDs a year. That sounds impressive, until you consider that Germany, France and the UK bought about 725 million CDs (PDF) in 2001. With those numbers, the iTunes sales would represent a world-changing 0.4% of music sales in those three countries.
They mention in one of the linked articles above that they "break even", just a tiny bit on the profit side.
For every $0.99 song sold on iTunes, Apple gets $0.35 and the label gets $0.65 (35%/65%). From Apples's $0.35 they also have to pay the CC processing fees, causing them to lose money on a single (I think). Apple trys to delay cc processing, hoping to charge you for more than one song at a time (and hence pay less in cc processing fees).
The artist gets about 0.02 to 0.05 cents an single from the major labels it seems. While some independent labels give much more (i.e. 75% ) to the artist.
I calculated these numbers from sites linked to by this page.
Sony has several retail stores around the world.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I assume you've seen Steve Jobs give his iTunes pitch. He's done it several times now at various events.
:-)
It basically goes like this:
People want to get their music one track at a time off the Internet. We know this because people are doing it like crazy, using these various underground services.
We want to give people what they want. But just giving them music-over-the-Internet isn't enough. Subscription services suck, too-restrictive licensing sucks, et cetera, et cetera.
Here's why illegal downloading is cool: (At this point he lists five or six key things. It's free, it's convenient, whatever.) But here's why illegal downloading sucks: (No art, bad encoding, hard to find stuff, and it's also stealing.)
Then he proceeds to explain how iTunes addresses those points, one by one. iTunes isn't free, but it's cheap. On the other hand, it's way easier to find things, the quality is much better, you get art with your tracks, and it's "good karma."
He actually builds the business case for iTunes from scratch, right there in front of you. It's a really cool presentation.
Whether you're an Apple fan or not, whether you're an iTunes fan or not, you have to admire Steve Jobs' ability to give shareholders, investors, partners, and end-users a well-thought-out, persuasive presentation.
All those dumbasses who think PowerPoint is the second coming could learn a lot from him.
I write in my journal
Have you looked at AllOfMP3? Cheaper than iTMS, and you can get the stuff in Ogg already. (And no DRM).
Oh, I don't know. In my experience, if I like any of the music on a given album, I probably will enjoy most of it.
Good examples: Mogwai's "Young Team" which I'm listening to right now. The Shins' "Chutes Too Narrow." The Postal Service's "Give Up." Lo-Fi Allstars' "How to Operate With a Blown Mind." Pretty much anything Garbage has recorded. Groove Armada. Morcheeba. Chicane's first two albums. Crystal Method's "Vegas." Massive Attack's "Mezzanine."
These are all albums I bought based on my having heard and liked one or two tracks. And they're all albums I can listen to all the way through over and over and over.
I write in my journal
I have never had the need to use my music on more than 3 computers simultaneously
You do know/remember that with iTunes 4.6 it is now 5 computers, right?
Other than that, right on and ditto.
Your Windows PC is my other computer.
Don't forget about the price of the tracks, which are significantly higher in Europe.
US Price: $0.99
UK Price: 79 pence ($1.43)
France/Germany Price: 0.99 Euro ($1.20)
And it's not just tax either - it's a blatant case of price hiking.
BBC reports 450,000 tracks out of 800,000 were sold in the UK.
Assume UK population = 60m
Means around 7.5 downloads per 1000 for the UK, not bad for the first week.
The only trouble is that they don't pay the artists. It's exactly as ethical as downloading from P2P, but costs more.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Sony has had retail stores long before Apple did.
To convert purchased songs without wasting a physical CD: Open iMovie. Make a new project. Drop a song into the timeline. Look inside your project's "Media" folder. Ta da! See that big file with the same name as your song? That's an AIFF--don't let the lack of an '.aif' suffix fool you. Enjoy.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Apple use Akamai to host the iTunes store and their other web-sites. Akamai have server farms all over the world. So when you use the store you're actually talking to a fairly local server.
This is incorrect in several ways.
First, none of the codecs you mentioned eliminate frequency ranges, inaudible or not. A CD master itself does eliminate some high frequencies, which were deemed inaudible (and which have subsequently been demonstrated through research *not* to be inaudible to a significant minority of people). Compression eliminates some descriptive information about the sound itself, and operates at all frequency levels (though it is designed to affect some more than others).
Second, the codec and the equipment may limit the ability to discern weakness in the file, but most people can discern a difference with relatively inexpensive equipment. In many cases, people must first be shown what to listen for, however. (I teach a class on this. With more than 600 participants over time, I can show about 18 out of every 20 people how to reliably discern a difference in double-blind tests between 192 kbps MP3's and 128 kpbs MP3's. We're not using the world's most expensive equipment, either.
Finally, I and nearly anyone else in the audio or music worlds would take strong issue with your implication that Bose systems are somehow superior to most comparably-priced systems. Bose uses off-the-rack components that are often only one step better than the absolute cheapest components made. That their prices don't reflect this is a victory of marketing, not design. Go to any serious audio discussion on the web and start asking around about Bose. They are an absolute sham.
elo