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."

Comments

Great in comparison to others, but ...

[burgburgburg]

not yet up to the 2.5 million a week from the US. Of course, this is the first week and demand ramps up as people sign up and get the tech down pat.

Someone wanna lend me $300?

[RabidChicken]

This is good news for Apple (obviously) but what will be more interesting is how this affects iPod sales. We all know the iTunes Music store is a pimp for the iPod, so now that we have a controlled environment that we can monitor closely, I guess we can prove if Apple's music model really works the way they planned.

Re:iTMS is marketed well

[Anonymous Coward]

What this proves is that Apple is becoming less a computer vendor and more a consumer electronics company. Sure, they still sell computers (I have a 12" PB), but their new focus is becoming clear. The surging price of AAPL only reinforces this new direction.

This may be a "bad thing"

[sdo1]

Lack of competition is not necessarily a good thing. I'm glad that the model of physical-medialess music is taking off, but I'm concerned about how much power Apple/iTunes may end up having in the future if they absolutely dominate the market. Will it be any better than the record industry now? (and don't kid yourself, there may be several "major" labels, but through the RIAA they act as one).

Look at a correlary in the "real world". What if the only place to get music was at your local Best Buy and that just about every other outlet sold orders of magnitude less.

Let's just be careful what we wish for...

-S

Re:This may be a "bad thing"

[jkabbe]

Even if all the other stores go out of business Apple will still have competition: file sharing networks.

Jobs seemed to be the first major player in the field to understand that you need to offer a competitive alternative to get people to use a store instead of Kazaa. I doubt that view will change anytime soon.

Re:This may be a "bad thing"

[eSims]

What you ar leaving out is the balance brought in by P2P sharing. While illegal, were it not for P2P (Napster, then Kazaa, Gnutella, etc) iTunes would not have 99c songs...

Though iTunes is the dominant factor in legal music downloads, the sharing aspect will always keep a bit of balance to the system.

That said, I am glad to see someone prove that this is a viable business as it lends credence to the statement "Give me a legal alternative" that many P2Pers have made.

My $.02 inflation adjusted... take it for what it's worth.

The winner

[phalse phace]

And Apple also beat it's closest competitor OD2 (On Demand Distribution), getting 16 times as many downloads.

Guess it didn't really matter that Napster beat Apple to launch there.

I wonder if the RIAA's listening?

Re:A question to our European readers

[fpillet]

Maybe just because iTMS matches users needs? It's not just because it's Apple, otherwise the world would be 80% Mac.

iTMS is (as are all Apple products) extremely well designed and they managed to produce exactly what people were waiting for. The complete chain (iTMS iTunes iPod) is perfectly integrated and even my mother can use it.

Re:In other news

[Twirlip of the Mists]

It would appear that whoever these artists are they just admitted that their albums aren't good enough to buy as a whole and they are just carried by one or two songs.

I don't think that's necessarily what they're saying.

Let's say we're talking about popular music, music that gets radio play. Maybe two or three songs on an album do well on the radio. Now, does that necessarily mean the other songs on the album are bad? No, it just means they're not radio material. Maybe they're too long, or too quiet, or whatever.

When music is available a la carte, people can go out and buy just the track they heard on the radio. But in doing so, they might miss out on some other really good music.

This has happened to me many time. I've bought an album because I wanted this track or that one, and in the end some of the other tracks became my favorites.

(Of course, some albums just aren't that great. But I don't think that's universally true. For every album you can name that's got one hit song on it, somebody else can name one that's solid all the way through.)

iTunes gets around this by giving you nice, long, high-quality previews of every available track. So when I saw the Garden State trailer and I wanted to get the song used in it, I listened to 30-second slices of the other songs from the album and discovered that they were all pretty darned good. So I bought the whole album.

See? It works both ways.

Anecdotes are not statistics

[fiannaFailMan]

I take your point, but I wish people would stop citing 'of all the people I know' as if that were a representative sample. If you work in desktop publishing, then it's a good bet that most of the 'people you know' will be Mac users. If you work as an accountant, then most of the 'people you know' will be PC users. If you're a TCAD software developer then most of the 'people you know' will be UNIX users.

It's like the people who bitch about authorities going to the expense of building bicycle lanes because "I never see a bike using that lane when I drive past every morning."

Anecdotes do not trump statistics.