Slashdot Mirror
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.
Sorry, but this is the obligatory gripe about the non-existence of an Australian iTunes Music Store.
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.
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
She probably likes the song. Different people have different tastes in music.
What's the point of putting down people who like different music than you?
Maybe she'll read this and feel bad. Or maybe other Faith Hill fans will read this and stop listening to the music that makes them happy.
Hmmm. And now much revenue did YOU earn over the past 3 years? I think thats phenomenal for a player of Apples size.
One of the secrets of keeping promotions like that profitable is that few of the winning entries ever get redeemed. People lose them or forget about finding them or don't care about them all the time. I'm sure the number of free songs downloaded from the music store is much lower than the number of free music codes distributed by Apple's promotional partners.
entry? promotion? what? im just talking about getting to the number 500 million
Right there you lost me. Me no want monthly plan. And I can convert Apple's AAC stuff to non-DRM MP3s and they sound great.
As I'm sure has been said before, personal preferences in music aren't governed by other people. I'm willing to bet $50 that not a single person on slashdot likes your whole collection of music either. Granted, I don't listen to Jessica Simpson or Kelly Clarkson, but considering they're selling quite a bit of music, I'd say somebody does. Ok, I'm done trolling now.
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
iTMS is not a loss leader. Early on it broke even or had a loss due to one time charges related to startup. In the mean time they have built up a dominating position in market share and mind share. The addition of Podcasts was a brilliant move to get even more people to use the store. Apple is positioning itself for the coming fee based Podcasts. Can you think of a Podcast you would pay $5 a year to listen to? What if Apple collected 1 of those 5 dollars and took care of all the subscription management and payment process.
The songs may be DRMed but its pretty fair DRM - I can make unlimited copies as long as I change the playlist, have legal copies on more than one computer and I can transfer everything to a new computer when I buy one.
The iTMS certainly helps sell iPods but now Apple is getting the reverse benefit. Having sold over 11 million pods in the last 6 months alone, there are a lot of Pod owners out there and by definition they are into music. If each one buys just one song a month over the next year thats over 120 million songs. Show a profit of just $.10 a song and you have $12 million. I still Limewire far more than I get off iTMS but I also have bought way more than one song a month for the last year and so has my wife.
Apple has created a way to earn a very very small fee off something everyone said people wouldn't pay for. They have also used that thing as a way to integrate Apple products into peoples daily lives and added "or a Macintosh" to the list of computer options people think of. Based on last quarters sales numbers, more and more are taking that option. And they make a profit on the service to boot. Apples PR machine is one of the best for NOT plastering how much profit they made off selling songs. They tell analysis that during their financial conference calls not on the front of the store.
"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!"
It took (give or take) 15 years between the viability of the MP3 format and the first hugely successful online music stores.
The online video retail market right now is like what the online music market was five years ago: it's there, but it's not widely used by content producers or consumers. With Apple, Creative and Microsoft all making noises about video players (either officially or unofficially), we'll probably have to wait less than five years. The leaked Netflix screenshots and other signs have been promising.
Sometimes it sucks being on the bleeding edge. I don't think it's an issue of whether the industry "gets it" -- they get it just fine; they understand that these things take time to build a market.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
I'm not trying to down on eMusic, but I think they would get a lot more traffic to their site if you didn't have to put in your billing information to even see a hint of their music catalog. I went there thinking "Hmm, they might have (obscure artist I like). If they do I might just sign up!" But they won't tell me the details until AFTER I type in my credit card? No thanks.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of being an indie music snob and specifically this past year working in "the biz," it's that everyone has shitty taste in music, except me (:
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
I might live another hundred years the way medicine is going.
I'm not confident Apple will be in the music business in a hundred years, or still producing an AAC decoder with FairPlay at that time.
Maybe there will be a breakthrough in information theory and they'll be able to losslessly transcode my songs for me, or maybe they'll give me access the lossless versions of the songs for free before they change formats. But neither of these is in the Terms of Service.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Poor stupid humans.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )