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iTunes Sells 500 Millionth Song
TJPile writes "Apple's iTunes Music Store can now say half a billion served. One look at Apple's front page says it all. Sunday, at 2:44PM EST, Amy Greer of Lafayette, Indiana bought Faith Hill's Mississippi Girl to win."
Now if only there was a store as popular as Apple's Itunes that didn't sell DRM-encrusted music files.
If I knew that the 500 millionth iTunes song purchase was coming up soon, I would at least have the decency of buying a good song.
No they can't. In the technology business, one has to be very careful and think twice. With half a billion served, their (Apple's) pockets are deep enough to attract the wrath of McDonalds should they "mess" around with "their" slogan.
Sorry, but this is the obligatory gripe about the non-existence of an Australian iTunes Music Store.
Hasn't anyone patented 'the display of multiple round numbers in celebration of sales achievement' yet? McDonalds should get on that.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
For me it still says "Open 24/7 on Macs and Windows PCs, the iTunes Music Store has become a smash hit, with music fans purchasing over 430 million songs worldwide to date."
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
If you look at the time line on the right side of the article page. It was just a little over a year ago that iTMS sold it's 100 Million song and now they are at half a Billion, 400 Million songs in just one year. I think that's amazing.
I know Uber users complain about the DRM but I can tell you that most people, just don't care. They have their songs they can burn them to CD put them on their iPods. That's about all most people want to do.
-S
It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
So at 99 cents per song, that's a little under 500 million in revenue over 3 years. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 33 billion dollar annual global music market. Only Apple could turn a turd like this into marketing hype.
I'd like a free pony too, but I'm more likely to get my pony than you are DRM-less RIAA music.
The first question that comes to mind is... how many of the downloads were free? I have seen so many ads for free songs (giveaways, contests, promotions, etc) on itunes, napster, etc that I have lost count. I wouldn't even hazard a guess at the paid:free ratio, it could be anything, 1:10, 1:1, 10:1...
How long ago Kazaa passed this mark and if any information was collected from it. I also wonder if information was published about said person and their music taste on a major news site. ;)
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
We all know that downloading music supports the terrorists.
On a more serious note, when will the TV and movie industry finally get it? I'm still stuck with downloading Stargate Atlantis over P2P as it doesn't air here (in Finland) at all... Give me the option to pay (a reasonable sum) for Pete's sake!
.: Max Romantschuk
Do any other music stores measure performance by the sale of songs? Well, most music stores don't actually sell songs, but do they even care about how many albums they sell? Hell No, music stores, just like any other business, care about PROFIT. It doesn't matter if you sell 10 billion songs, how much money are you making?
Apple has been using the ITMS store as a loss leader to sell ipods, but there will come a day when the IPOD market becomes saturated. Instead of republishing meaningless Apple PR on Slashdot, perhaps a more interesting discussion would be, how will Apple make money of its music business when the MP3 player market has reached saturation?
"...they certainly have alot to learn."
And you need to learn "a lot" is two words!
Apple
Seriously now.....
Error 407 - No creative sig found
So at 99 cents per song, that's a little under 500 million in revenue over 3 years. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the 33 billion dollar annual global music market.
But considering that most of it came from last year's sales (400 million?), I'd say that even 1% share of global music market from a single store is quite huge contribution.
Especially when they are selling their music a lot cheaper than those new Britney Spears albums and whatever happens to sell well these days in the US.
http://codeandlife.com
see http://www.apple.com/, not the link mentioned above
When the policeman of the tie, rule you violate, hello punishment of the kitty?
then why were we linked to the itunes page? Someone needs to update the link
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
Maybe the 430M figure is what Apple's reporting, and this site accidentially did the math if it were, say MiS (Mega binary Songs; multiplied 430 by 2^20) and just rounded up!
Apple's iTunes Music Store can now say half a billion served. ...Except that you didn't link to their lovely half-a-billion front page, you linked to the store page which they forgot to update since 'over 430,000 '.
For the teeming horders: clicky on the apple in the top left, et voila.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
It seems like iTunes has the market completely under control at the moment, the fashionability of macs themselves, along with the iPod have helped make iTunes the must have store, compared to Napster and others
It's good to see apple succeeding with something they innovated in, I feel we will be seeing the 1 billionth song purchase in the near future.
Business Voyeur
Just look
at what the prize winning losers were buying!Jessica Simpson? Kelly Clarkson? Brian McKnight?!
Oh the agony...
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
Because at 2:43, I was browsing iTMS and the counter at the top had ~499,938,000. Taking further data points, I came up with a time for the 500 millionth song fully 11.5 min after 2:44....
Of course I know the counter probably wasn't real-time, blah blah...
That said, the ARE damn good at PR.
Now if only us Australian could get the iTunes music store that has been a matter of weeks away for the last 18 months...
we should support "smaller" sites like eMusic, so they can expand their selection to include more popular selectioins and have a chance to compete with the likes of iTunes. They off high quality, legal, non-DRM mp3s for 22-25 cents (depending on your monthly plan). Right now they are offering 50 free downloads from their very unique catalog (of which you can cancel if you like, but I'm sure not going to). Some of the stuff you can get from iTunes (so it's cheaper from eMusic.com) but a lot of you can't because it's from mostly independent labels or back-collections. If you like great music no-one's heard of, this is your site. The user-base seems pretty knowledable about what's good, so their "list" feature is nice. They also have incorporated some social networking/clustering features which allow you to see who your "neighbors" are with common interests. Supporting a site like eMusic, allows them to expand their already great selection, so check them out: eMusic.com. At least try it out, get your free mp3s, and then decide. They are offering 50 free because they believe that once you try it, you'll want to continue using the service; it's the best kind of advertising gimmick there is: offering a good product.
Any bets on how long befor Apple serves more tunes than McDonalds served Big Macs? Half a billion is a pretty respectable number, and I wonder what the initial corporate expectations were when iTunes launched. I bet they would have been happy with 50 million by now.
Voice your opinion!
Please read my reply to Kohath; it seems you people cannot take a joke. It's not like Faith Hill fans would give a flying fu^H^H damn anyway.
I agree the moderation of the grandparent post is ridiculous though, but ludicrous moderations are not a rare sight on Slashdot.
...what the headlines would say if the 500 millionth was "Grab the devil by the horns and f**k him up the ass" by Sum41?
LOL
> How is this news?
1) Slashbots hate Apple, and a story about Apple being successful allows them to whine.
2) Slashbots hate DRM, and a story about the public not minding DRM allows them to whine.
3) Slashbots hate closed-source, and a story about closed-source allows them to whine.
4) Slashbots hate any story vaguely related to the entertainment world, and stories about bright, wealthy, attractive people who can walk in direct sunlight allow them to whine.
Any more questions?
you can "burn" the songs to a cd-image if you like, and rip this cd-image to mp3/flac/ogg, whatever you want. all within your rights. (yes, this includes you, Americans. :)
without some form of DRM, I very much doubt that you'll ever see big-label music on there. Just not gonna happen - I don't think it was Apple's choice to DRM iTMS stuff; I'd bet a week's pay it was a condition imposed by the cartel.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Yes, I am well aware of the "damage" that happens when converting between lossless formats, but MP3s are a way to ensure your music investment is playable in the future, long after the iTMS verifcation server goes offline or a stricter form of DRM replaces FairPlay.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
if sites like this did proliferate, catering to independent labels who arguably do care more about the music than turning an exuberant profit, then perhaps the ideals that the community against things like DRM uphold would proliferate as well.
Inside Mac Radio indicated that sales of singles this year are up and as predicted on this site a long time ago, sales of albums are down. Sales of legal downloads are up dramatically.
500-million...
I had a hand in that. Thanks iTunes!
What's so special about 500 million? It's a purely arbitrary number. It's not even round in any useful number base. Now if it was 536,870,912 then that would be interesting.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
They certainly aren't selling people the actual songs, just a license to use it. That is the product, a license.
Click here to claim your prize!!!
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
more like the software makes sure that her and her hubby sound good. she got where she is on looks and the hard work of many sound engineers. Tim won't sing into a mic that's not being filtered through ProTools to autocorrect his voice.
They will make money by innovating and also by offering both the cheapest player on the market (think Shuffle) and the more high end one for people who want that sort of stuff. This is no different than when the PC manufacturers markets became saturated and they started competing on price/performance. As long as Apple stays true to its nature and designes products that work well and are a pleasure to use, as well as looking good, they will be fine :)
"The boy is dangerous, they all sense it, why can't you?"
Y'know... her tax bill is going to be rather larger because of this.
10,000 song card value: $9,900
10 x 50 song card value: $495
10 x iPod color 60gb: $3,990
4 Coldplay tickets and backstage passes: (no idea here, we'll go for $100 each): $400
Additional reported income: $14,785
Hopefully she'll be able to sell some of that stuff so she'll be able to pay taxes on the cash value. Apple is required to report the maximum possible value of these to the IRS, and it'll be included as income for 2005.
Maybe she's a housewife or a dependant and doesn't have much income for this to get tacked onto.
The iTMS could always say that. This is the first time it can say it truthfully though.
THIS
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say "Amy Greer of Lafayette, Indiana leased Faith Hill's Mississippi Girl to win?"
...
Not to be overly pedantic, but the music labels are horribly opposed to us "consumers" actually owning *anything.* The Sonny Bono Retroactive Indefinite Copyright Extension Act was brilliant. They're struggling to control the distribution channel. Pretty soon they'll be using DRM to control the end-user applications - {clippy}"Sorry, you only have the One Play per Day license on song 'GarbageOfTheWeek.' Would you like to upgrade to the Unlimited Per-Day license for only a few sheckels per month more?"{/clippy}
Yeah, I'm done now
We must show Apple that there is a market for iTunes on Linux. So please sign: http://www.petitiononline.com/itmslin/
With the recent article about Googling for CIA agents... http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/15/20 15229&tid=158&tid=95&tid=1
Is it wise to place the name and city of the winner in a major announcement like this?
is based on two parties making an exchange which enriches them both.
If some kid's got no better use for $0.99 than to give it to some corporation so I can listen to some music, be cool, get into a better social class, find a better job, find a better mate, and be on his way to ruling the universe, and megacorp.com has got no better use of that music than to sell it to the kid, hey, I think progress is being made. Everybody wins.
The Astroturf_Alert is accepting nominations.
If you were talking about other stores you might be correct.
But once you buy a song from ITMS, it cannot be revoked by Apple - so you own that song.
Now you might then go on to argue about transferrability, and that is an issue - but to me revokability is the line between "owning" something or not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Over 500 million served.
OK, that was so 1998...
eMusic is great and all, but another option to support artists better is to still buy stuff from ITMS - but try and look for stuff on labels that are more fair to the artist.
Here I am thinking in particular of CDBaby. They are a great label with very fair terms for artists, and you can find thier stuff on ITMS, like The Haight Gang.
One thing I wish ITMS would offer is the ability to search by label (or even see the label a song comes from!).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I was wondering if people slowed down purchases until the counter got close - I would have liked to see the usage graph to see if there was much of a spike around the 500b mark!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The point is that what you're suggesting is a very lossy process.
feh. stuff.
...government sponsored agencies, asshole.
Hearts,
THE WOZ
That's really interesting, that she downloaded the winning song at 2:44 pm est, or 11:44 am pst. I know that the counter on the front page definitely hadn't hit 500 million yet as of 6 pm pst last night. I think it still hadn't hit at 11 pm, and that the big congrats message showed up around 1 or 2 am.
That means that the cache between the counter and actual songs sold count is greater than than a lot of people thought. I've heard estimates of a 5,000-7,000 song difference, but the actual must be something like 500,000-700,000 songs! Trying to time your buying to the front page counter is just completely hopeless.
I am a recent Mac convert, and love a lot of Mac software, especially iTunes. Despite this, I've never bought a track from the iTunes shop, and I find it hard to understand why so many people do, because the quality is so low. If I spend money on a track, I expect it to be loss-less quality, or certainly higher than 128 AAC (which I know is fairly good), no matter how convenient.
I know you're asking for TV shows, but interestingly enough I visited MLB.com this morning and noticed they have a Digital Download section. There I found for $3.50 I can purchase a full broadcast of any of their available baseball games, including the 2005 All Star Game or the 1965 ALCS. Pretty neat if you're a baseball fan.
But then when I went to checkout I discovered that the download is a WMV file at 350k bit rate. BLECH, give me Quicktime or give me death.
He said "fair share".
How cuuuuute!
flac is not lossy :)
No, the counter was inaccurate. I looked at it for the first time yesterday within minutes of when the 500,000,000 song was purchased. At the rate it was counting the 'predicted' time was around midnight, but this was won at around 14:30.
Now that's even more interesting, I was wondering how accurate the counter was. I would still like to see if there was a surge around the time the counter itself got close to 500,000,000, even if the winning song was already sold!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Can't see what the fuss is with itunes... you have to pay to get tech support (oh, sorry, you *might* be charged a fee to call their support line) on a windows xp machine running itunes (thanks for bundling it with quicktime, nice to always have a choice), using firefox as a default broswer, if you're unwilling to give apple your credit card # to create an account they're nice enough to offer paypal. However it doesn't work (at least under the config mentioned above) it'll link you to your paypal account (it opens firefox), where you agree to let apple deduct whatever they feel like from your paypal (and thusly BANK) account. You sign away all pre-warning, and you agree if they do something naughty to try to make things right via the paypal dispute crap.
So, sure, I figure I'll only download the one album, then delete the agreement. So I click ok, I hereby sign my soul away. Success! I now have an agreement with apple. But wait, back in the Itunes window I still can't click continue to finish creating my account. Hmmmmm, I must not have done something right, so I then click on authorize paypal account. Again it opens a firefox window, and I again sell my soul. However, the itunes window doesn't change, and my requested ID doesn't work. Hmmmm... I next receive two letters from paypal saying I created a Billing Agreement (which for the record allows apple to deduct up to $5,000 a month from my account!!!)
So, I then navigate through paypal's setup to cancel the billing agreements. of course the instructions paypal gives are incorrect, so I have to wander through myself.
End result, apple didn't make any money, I didn't get my album, and I'm now boycotting Itunes.
Lovely service all in all. After all, it did save me money, and isn't that really what it's all about?
Does that make iTunes the "Walmart" of the online music business, only less evil and with naughty words allowed?
In other news, Jimmy Jippers of Los Angeles, CA, has downloaded the one billionth song from Limewire! Congrats Jimmy, you've won a subpeona!
Wow, good going on that boycott, except I think you are a little off-base on the whole "Apple didn't make any money" point. But I'm sure they are getting the message loud and clear. (How about submitting a bug report instead? It would have taken less time than writing this whiney, off-topic comment, and it would sure as hell be more effective than a one-customer boycott. Is it even called a "boycott" when it is just one customer?)
After I download my songs from iTMS, I pop in a CD-RW, quick-format, burn, rip. All the song information is automatically filled in on the MP3, since it was ripped on the same machine that burned it. Seriously, it only adds about 10-15 minutes to the 4+ hours I spend selecting music and downloading it.
If I was an audiophile, I might be upset about the slight loss in sound quality from a re-rip, but I'm not, so I'm not. Besides, how many audiophiles download lossy music to play on headphones anyways?
BTW: 50% of the music I got from iTMS is from the Pepsi promo from this last year. Probably why the big boom in sales. (I'm normally a Coke drinker) I sure hope they bring this promo back soon.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
I didn't enter my billing information until just recently. Are you sure the information was REQUIRED? I remember being asked, but I left it blank.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Poor stupid humans.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Now finally, at last, a ham radio article on Slashdot!!!
This is the funniest recurring troll ever!
Because most of us aren't audiophiles? The quality is more then good enough for me. Most of my songs get re-ripped into MP3s, put on a flash drive, and played on my truck's MP3 player. (broadcast to the FM radio)
Many other people play theirs on their iPod with the standard headphones.
Remember: the original walkman, which played tapes, use to be good enough for most people. MP3s are much better then tapes.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Try this: Signup without giving any CC info. Find the music you like, when you click "buy now" from the shopping cart, it'll ask for your CC info then, and won't store it.
I did that for a while, but eventually just gave them my CC to store for the convenience.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Theoretically the CD burning ability lets you do both. Though I think the terms you buy it under explicity mention no resale...
Still, like I said they key to me is the leash from above. If I can keep playing my music without the company existing then I consider it mine - when Napster or Rhapsody go belly-up there will be a mighty wailing and gnashing as people suddenly realize what DRM means.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Kudos to this guy.
c id=13009888
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155180&
Missed it by a day and a half.