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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."
A lot of people on here were doubting that the UK has much of a Macintosh userbase.
Of the people I know who've used iTMS AND BOUGHT SOMETHING, about half are Mac users and half aren't.
I know a lot more Windows users who've installed it though.
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So while inertia-bound Microsofattempts to shift itself toward its many stated directional goals and moribund music industry giants try to pedal their own wares, puny Apple Computer, with a less than perfect portfolio continues to run rings around these beasts. I'm not exactly a fan of Apple, and find it quite odd that they have branched into music distribution, but I do love these results. Apple is establishing itself well and by the time the competition sorts out its own problems iTunes will be ubiquitous.
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Uhm... I'm not sure how likely it is that the UK, France and Germany will reach that figure until the actual Euro-wide launch has taken place. There are considerbly less people in the UK, France and Germany than there are in the US. Without doing any calculations, per capita I would say 800,000 seems about right - maybe a bit under.
miniature American flags for others! If anything, the early success of the iTMS in selected european countries indicates a trend that global internet business models can work in selected markets. Yet the internet in its most basic sense is about bringing information (or data, in this case) to all. Rather than simply transplanting the store to countries with similar capitalstic structures, the true "revolution" will be marked by the universal ability to experience the global art of music. Apple has not forged a new beachead. yet.
A bit off topic, but it will come up anyways, so mod me however you wish:
.ogg for use in UT2004 seemed unnecessarily complex (burn to cd, rip to wav, encode to ogg), and as such I am wondering if a DRM is really necessary. I haven't pirated music in over a year now, and indeed have no such music on my laptop (or iPod) currently: I am now more prone to buy music from iTMS.
I've used iTunes since its inception (on OS 9), and have bought around 30-40 songs since the release of iTMS US (and have also downloaded the countless weekly free tracks). The DRM, while not particularly inconvenient to me (I have a 20GB iPod) seems to be a great sticking point to others. I have never had the need to use my music on more than 3 computers simultaneously, and have never needed to burn a playlist so many times as to exceed the iTunes limit (and even then you can change the playlist and burn again)
That said, the steps necessary to convert my favorite fragging tracks to
I am proud of Apple's successes and hope they go far in the future, but DRM is a dangerous and narrow path, and I only hope that Steve Jobs doesn't take his penchant for control too far with this one. Until that time, the current implementation is sufficient for me, and with new technologies such as Airtunes connectivity and convergence are becoming more mainstream: the need for DRM-less files is becoming less.
However... Apple needs to open their format to other companies. I dont give a damn, Steve, if iPod comprises 50%, 75% or even 100% of the market, if another company wants to use your insanely great AAC Protected format, they should be able to. The fact that consumers cannot use other digital devices to play the product Apple is selling is a major sticking point with many, and the tools necessary to allow this are being intentionally broken with each successive iTunes release.
Yes, I'm a fervent Mac Evangelist, but while this works perfectly for me, getting a friend with another mp3 player to start using a Mac and/or the iTMS is going to be pretty hard if I have to explain to him that he has to break the user agreement to play the files by breaking the DRM.
The format needs to be opened, and it needs to happen soon.
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I would not be so sure about that... I personally know a few PC peeps who have iTunes installed and absoluting raving about it to a degree that they admit theyr next purchase to be a Mac. In a year or so, when their current PC is outdated.
the iPods receive short term market share gain from th iTMS, but i think the other Apple hardware will benefit in a year or so.
I'll eat my hat if, over the next 2 years, Apple market share doesn't rise to 150% of what they have now.
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Probably has something to do with it. Bam Thwok is exclusive to iTMS, and got a mention in nearly all of the iTunes launch coverage. Considering that the Pixies are currently touring Europe, I'm sure that drove plenty of sales. I for one bought Bam Thwok on iTMS launch day.
On each $0.99 retail Apple charges per song, shares are taken by the copyright holder (artist/label/RIAAbot), the retail outlet (iTMS/Virgin/Songhut), the finance transactor (Visa/telco/Guido) and Apple. What's Apple's share per song, their profit on these huge sales? Do they take a loss, leading sales of iPods and some Macs?
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Those are some pretty impressive numbers indeed. In one week iTMS is supposedly the most popular music service in Europe now. Here's my question: since there were already other services up and running in Europe, were the European users waiting for iTMS to arrive and then just went nuts when it opened? Or did everyone switch from the other services? Why the huge numbers, which are blowing the other services out of the water, when others were available?
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Here's what I've been wondering:
I'm in the US and at the bottom of the iTMS home pages, I can select which country's store I want to see (USA, UK, France, Germany). When I select one, I'm taken to the store.
Can I, from the US, purchase songs from the foreign stores? I know I could try this myself, but I've been a bit leery. Anyone else tried this and have it work or otherwise? Each country store has some unique music not found on the others, and I'd like to buy some of those tracks.
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yes, but its just called AOL UK, you'll never hear the words America On-Line UK
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Jobs has repeatedly said that Canada's liberal IP policies with respect to software distribution and protection prevent it from becoming an a-list geography. I wouldn't hold your breath if I were you.
And the headline reads: All of Europe buys equivalent of 65,000 CDs this week. Europe buys roughly 3 billion recorded music units (PDF) (almost all of which are CDs) a year. Even if iTunes maintained that sales rate (which is extremely unlikely), they'd sell the rough equivalent of 3.4 million CDs a year, or roughly 0.1 % of the total CDs sold. Sure, that'll make a dent in this whole piracy thing.
So what stopped people in the rest of the world from using iTunes? Is this just a mirror site with a euro converter?
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That's what Apple says, but be leery of claims like this. Sony and Nintendo said the same thing about their console hardware, just to scare others off of the market. In fact, they made money off their consoles, just not very much. MS then entered the market, and really lost money on the consoles. Successful FUD!
Companies say "loss leader" in an attempt to invalidate the business assumptions of competitors. If you think about it, it's unlikely that iTMS is losing money. It's more likely that they're not making much money.
That phrase is working, though. The "iTMS is not a money maker" is driving others in the industry crazy, because competitors think they need hardware/iPod equivalents. Plus it's being parroted by members of the general public (ie: right here).
So why exactly would they want to open this up, and help other companies sell devices?
Folks have often argued that they should at least open it up in areas where Apple doesn't yet have a market. They key word people are forgetting when they make this argument is yet.
Again, how is it in Apple's interest to let other companies piggyback onto Apple's extremely difficult (legally, technically), barely-profitable venture that is the iTunes Music Store?
Russia has compulsory licensing and AllOfMP3 pays royalties to the collection agency.
And they've negotiated the relicensing necessary to be able to distribute those songs internationally?
That's a pretty impressive task. I would guess that Apple and Microsoft must be fighting over whoever pulled that one off, as both of them have been completely unable to manage the same task within a single continent, let alone for the whole world!
British pound sterling to United States dollar 0.790000 = 1.436807 US$ European Union euro to United States dollar 0.990000 euro = 1.196929 US$
Hmm, so then why are the record labels more willing to experiment with copy protected music discs (which are not CDs) in Europe than in US?
This is a valid argument as long as they force radio stations to play the entire album instead of a single track.
There are two problems with this thinking. The first is that radio is really just a commercial for the album. I think of it as analagous to a movie trailer. They're both lower quality previews of what you can expect to get when you purchase the full product. No one expects to pay $1 to get the best scene from a movie though.
The second problem is that the kind of album that is one coherent piece of art, is unlikely to garner a lot of radio play, kind of making this a moot arguement.
I think it is also illegal to broadcast an entire album from a band non stop, at least in the US anyway.
The easy way (in a boneheaded twist) would be to just publish the album as a single track. It's already random access, after all.
I actually have an album that is like this, and I find it quite annoying (I split it up manually when I ripped it). However, I don't think the end user should be forced to listen to the whole album at one sitting. You're allowed to pause movies, watch a certain scene only, or again, read one chapter of the book, etc. In all those cases you're given the whole piece of art, and told to do with it what you wish. That is how I look at albums. And that's the reason I see why an artist might want you to have the whole thing and not just a song or two.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Just curious, does Apple deliver iTunes Europe purchases from servers in the U.S. or do they have a European server farm for that ? Is global connectivity now good enough that servers in California can deliver that volume of data around the globe to Europe at about the same throughput and latency as could servers located in Europe ?
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CD quality is a highly subjective thing. I have encoded a CD as AAC and played it on my iPod and a CD player (with the same amp and speakers) and found it sound better on the iPod (the CD player was from the '80s, and did not handle digital to analogue conversion as well as the iPod. These results are probably not repeatable with a modern CD player).
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Erm. That's not true.
Check the latest multiformat 128 kbps test. MP3 was tied with AAC (AAC only had a slight advantage, but technically they were tied, check the error margin). Here you can see the end results.
It's completely false that AAC 128 kbps delivers "CD quality" and this test also showed that. No lossy format can do this (yet?). And I'm not talking about problematic samples here. Try to do a simple ABX test (you don't need extra expensive hardware, just some decent sound card and headphones).
It's possible to achive transparency with lossy formats on more than 99.9% of the cases (or whatever), but not with 128 kbps.
Cya
Ok. Here is the thing. The 128Kbps ACC files on iTMS are not the same as 128Kbps AAC files ripped from a CD let alone crappy 128Kbps MP3. The songs on the iTMS are encoded with a professional quality encoder from the Studio masters. Encoding from a CD would mean you were encoding twice. Once to PCM and again to ACC or MP3.
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