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iTMS Moving Up The Sales Charts
Kyusaku Natsume writes "According to the NPD Group, Apple's iTunes Music Store has sold more music than Tower Records and Borders in the U.S., based on sales and download figures for July, August, and September." From the article: "At seventh equal in the chart was iTunes, up seven places on the same period last year. Both Tower Records and Borders slipped a place to seven and nine respectively. Russ Crupnick, music and movies industry analyst for NPD, said he would not be surprised if iTunes was to continue to climb the charts, especially in the run-up to Christmas when iPods are high on many present lists."
Well my kids enjoy the Chipmunks I got last week and I couldn't find it in a normal shop.
aedan
Can they hit the Target next?
Why not have a system where once I own a song, I own it in perpetuity, and can download it again whenever I want?
I wonder when the first lawsuit over consumer rights and ownership of 'lost' music files will be?
The run-up to Christmas? Wouldn't it be more likely that it will climb after Christmas, after said iPods are opened and starting to be used?
Does anybody have any idea what kind of margins iTMS has compared to a physical store? Considering all the money saved on CDs, leaflets, distribution, the profit per song should be much higher at the iTMS.
Somehow I get the feeling the record companies are the ones cashing in.
The next retail high-season, pshaw. Think twelve years from now. Apple competitors in the media-hub-style emerging markets have puckered anuses. Meanwhile it's full steam ahead towards full vertical integration at Apple.
It's an old saw by now, but since Sony isn't there already (and they could've been, nearly), Jobs is willing to play that role. This will probably be a good thing for operating systems, as an aside.
Damn those pesky terrorists
i have a friend whose band is on itunes, they are called yonni. they have no record deal at the moment, but recorded the songs in a studio themselves. maybe in the future companies like apple will replace traditional record companmies entirely. would be nice, no dirty executives and slimy contracts, just the musician and the record store, how it should be. watch record company executives everywhere get worried...
* A recent example of this - I liked "Batman Begins" very much, and thought it was sufficiently well-written and directed that I'd like to reward the makers by buying a copy, even if it's not something I'm necessarily going to watch again enough to justify the purchase. Upon it's arrival, I opened the box and the first thing that fell out was not a nice, slick inlay, but a anti-piracy leaflet from piracyisacrime.com. Rolling my eyes, I placed the DVD into my player and settled down to watch the film, and what do I see? No slick animated menus, not even the boringly superfluous trailers for films I'm never going to watch, but a fucking commercial equating "piracy" with car-theft!. It looks like it was supposed to be unskippable, too, but thankfully my player does not have the "prevent the owner from skipping stuff he doesn't want to see" "value addition". The lunacy of this is astounding - it is as if PickleWorld(TM) created a huge, terrifying banner equating pickle-theft with murder to be placed in their stores, but instead of putting it over the side-exit or whichever mode of exit is usually employed by the serial pickle-thief, they put it over the checkout where it can only be seen by paying customers!
FUCK YOU PICKLEWORLD!
--SSJ
I think that there's nothing wrong with digital music downloading. The songs in the ITMS are only like 99 pence and it saves a trip out in the cold winter to the record store.
although they may have drm at least they don't have rootkits. record company shot itself in the foot there. looks like the slow and drawn out death of the record companies is inevitable
A few days ago there was a story about how iTunes is expected to change its 99 cent flat pricing in the next year; in that article the following claim is made, "EMI said today that digital sales, made up 4.9% of the company's sales in the last six months, up from 2.1% a year ago." (http://www.forbes.com/2005/11/16/apple-emi-itunes -cx_pak_1116autofacescan08.html). How can iTunes be so high in one chart, yet only account for less than 5% of EMI's total sales in the same period. From what I understand, EMI should be getting the majority of the sale on iTunes, so I'd expect it to be a bit higher.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Why doesn't one of these studies ever compare both sales and P2P traffic at once, rather than one group studying sales, another studying P2P, and the RIAA censoring it all as yet another group compiles it into one report..?
-JDS
(and wasn't the original press release 5 days ago?)
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
No, seriously.
If you do anything remotely important with your computer (entertainment included), then you should be doing regular back ups.
Restoring iTunes music and video files from a backup set of DVD-Rs or an external hard disk is almost effortless. If you value your electronic purchases (and other data) that much, you'll back it up.
Now as for being able to play your DRM'd files in 20 years, you might want to transcode or do like most people did when going from VHS to DVD: re-purchase in the new format.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I'm also somewhat hesitant about accepting these figures. Online, CDBaby nearly outsells Amazon.com, yet it's nowhere to be seen in this chart. It is of course always possible that they're at position 11 or thereabouts (Hey Derek: you reading? Any idea?), but likewise it wouldn't surprise me at all if they'd been completely disregarded, given that they only sell independent artists...
iTunes makes more sense when you're looking for music. I only knew that at Best Buy, I'd look for something and it would take a minute to find the right section, and then another minute to find the right area where the artist theoretically should be, and then another to determine that no, they don't have the CD.
Stranger still is the fact that some bands STILL refuse to (or their labels prohibit them from) posting all their CDs on iTMS. I'm looking at you, Dave Matthews Band.
What's the deal with that? Do they intentionally want to lower their sales figures? Or do they still operate in the theoretical haze of "profit margins" for sales that don't exist (iTMS) vs. sales that might exist otherwise (Best Buy, Tower)?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
"Apple is the living embodiment of evil because they don't deliver me full quality ogg in a DRM free CD and DVD and and thumbdrive and certainly won't call me in 6 months with my free BluRay / HD because information wants to be free as in air."
"All digital music is compromised crap anyway, I only listen to each band live in concert in the first city of every tour, 4th row center. Please IM me at "in33dskymil3s247".
"iPods can't hold a candle to those myriad failed / bankrupt players, but Apple has succeeded because they have managed to emulate MS in their draconian underhanded methods. Fight the power!"
"Ah, yet more solid proof that Apple will in the ashcan in mere hours - Dvorak is working on revision 37 of his eulogy as we speak - this time for sure!"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I can't imagine to pay for a DRMmed file that's not very high quality, to boot. I'm a typical headphones listener, and even through crappy A/Ds you hear a serious difference...
I'm enough of an audiophile that the high range tinniness in mp3s bugs me but not enough of one to know what "crappy A/Ds" are. I also agree that it's a bit of lump to pay money for a low-quality AAC/mp3. Sometimes when I get turned on to a new act, I preview on iTunes and then order from half.com. In fact, that's pretty much what I do for eighty to ninety percent of my music.
However, I have purchased maybe forty songs from iTMS and have received from friends maybe several hundred 128 kbps AACs/mp3s, and I notice a gigantic difference when I listen to those files on a pair of regular speakers/headphones and when I listen to those files using a pair of <BRANDNAME> in-ear canal phones.
For example, I have a pair of Sennheisers and listening to low-quality files on them is an awful experience. I also have a pair mid-range floor speakers and listening to low-quality audio files on them practically makes my ears bleed. But the <BRANDNAME> canal-phones provide a very different experience. I'm afraid to say "good," but that's pretty much what listening to AAC and mp3 files using those canal-phones is like. Even tracks with a wide dynamic range (yeah, I'm a child of the 70s) sound really good.
I guess this a long way of saying that the hardware you use to play low-quality music files makes all the difference in the world. Playing cheap tracks on high-quality hardware not optimized for compressed music just plain sucks. On the other hand, paying a bit of a premium for appropriate hardware might surprise your ears. I'm glad I received my canal-phones as a gift since they run about a quarter of the price of a new iPod (the high-end ones cost much more than even the top-of-the-line iPod), but that very unpretentious piece of hardware (black instead of mug-me-white cords) makes all the difference in the world.
blog
Times are changing. People are no longer satisfied paying upwards to $20 USD for physical media which becomes more and more restrictive as time goes by.
The "free love" people tasted with P2P was a stake in the heart of the physical format. We can't go back to the way things were. People like iTunes because it sucks less than the alternatives. Sure, it's coated with DRM, but at least it's not installing rootkits on your PC.
Home recording, inexpensive marketing via the internet, and the digital media formats are the trifecta that will strip a lot of undeserving middle-aged record execs of their Diablos.
The music recording industry is fixing to implode, but what rises from the ashes could be very promising.
Why does the abbreviation of iTunes have the letter M in it?
Shouldn't it, logically, be ITNS? Or is ITNS used by some one else that I'm not aware of?
Please explain this one to me.
Hey, can I solicit some advice from you?
:)
I just sent my daughter a nano for Christmas, all loaded up her MP3s from her old computer.
If she plugs the iPod into her new computer Christmas morning, is she liable to erase all the songs on it? Any special instructions I should send her? (Other than: install the drivers before connecting ipod!
Thanks,
m/m
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Another first post modded redundant?
Note to mods: either increase the dose of whatever you're taking or quit doing drugs entirely. This is embarrasing!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
-matt
That said, I find I do almost all of my music shopping on iTunes now. The main reasons being that they have a lot of older music which is not always easy to find in a record store, and that with copy-protected CDs becoming more and more prevalent, I don't want to run the risk of bringing something nasty home to my Windows PC. (It would be a PITA to have to use my Slackware box to rip everything, then copy it over to the Windows PC anyway because that's where iTunes lives.) iTunes is safe and convenient and has a better selection than most conventional record stores.
Also, the quality of AAC 128 is just fine for me. There is a difference from CD, but it is so minimal that I can't really justify not buying from iTunes just out for the sake of quality alone. The quality far surpasses cassette tape, and I used to have a huge library of tapes. Considering I do most of my listening in the car, tape quality is just fine, and AAC 128 is far better than tape quality. I'm playing through an FM transmitter anyway!
The other nice thing about AAC is that the algorithms (at least in QuickTime's encoder, it seems) are so deterministic that I find if I have to, for some reason, rip an audio CD that I burned from AAC files, if I rip it again in AAC at the same bitrate, I honestly can't tell any difference at all. Perhaps you could do the same with MP3 (provided you use the exact same encoder) or WMA, but out of the three, AAC is the only one that sounds near perfect at 128kbps for all music types. I find that WMA9 at 128 is good for most music, but it is dreadfully awful at most country music at that bitrate. It has trouble with fiddle, steel guitar, and some vocal subtleties.
All in all, I think that Apple has a good product overall in the combination of the iTMS, the iTunes application, and the iPod. It works well as a system, the cost of music is low, the DRM is fair, and the quality of music is high. I don't think anyone else offers a solution that matches in all those areas. So I'm not surprised to see iTMS becoming a major player in music sales, especially given the skyrocketing popularity of the iPod.
No, they don't.
Throw the bums out!
When iTunes first came out I bought a song out of novelty, but I already had such a substantial music selection on CD it seemed rather pointless. I primarily listen to indie rock, but recently I have been buying a lot more classical. iTunes is really the only good way to buy classical. Going into Best Buy to discuss Brahms and his Hungarian Dances is pointless, and you can't tell if they are of very good quality until you get them home. In addition to the ability to listen to the music in advance the prices are much better. If you go into a shop with a decent selection of classical music everything starts at $30. I get albums for $9.99 on iTMS. I really hope iTunes becomes more successful because music sales have been something of a racket for so long.
iTunes is really the only good way to buy classical.
Classical at 128Kbps? What does that sound like?
Da Blog
your funny.
so i guess apple is going to stop making pro software too, where 20% of their revenue comes from high margin software sales?
all those pro video people they have on over to buy G5 towers, with 30" monitors , with FCP, DVDSP, are all going to love working off iMacs. I know they are cause I am one of them.
And the print designers, yeah they are going to take it in the ass if it means they can dump thier expandable towers to get to use a mac mini! fuck yeah!
i mean your just hysterical.
Maybe it is a regional thing, but Hastings is by far the most popular brick-and-mortar music store among all the people I know. Best Buy and Circuit city both have a smaller selection and higher prices than Hastings. Same with Sam Goody, although I can understand it getting a spot, since teens who live at the mall usually shop there. I can also see Walmart at the top spot, and know a few people who buy music there. FYE must also be a regional thing because I have never heard of it.
This list has some tough implications for the RIAA and its members. None of the top four companies gets most of its revenue from music. They're all very strong companies used to telling their suppliers what prices they want to see. The classic "record store" chains, Tower and Sam Goody, are falling off the list.
Some of the changes just reflect consolidation in the record store industry. FYE is a classic "record store" chain. It's really Trans World Entertainment, the result of mergers between Wherehouse, Record Town, Camelot Music, and Strawberries. Stores in malls carry the FYE brand ("offering a consistent mall-based retailing experience"), while freestanding stores bear the names Wherehouse Music, Coconuts Music & Movies, Strawberries, Spec's, CD World, Streetside Records and Planet Music.
Also, don't forget that Wal-Mart sells music on-line. Even if the RIAA can bully Apple into raising the song price for iPods, that's not going to work with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart just won't tolerate suppliers increasing their prices. They'll find other suppliers. Note the growing list of "Wal-Mart exclusives".
The problem with this is the assumption that twelve songs is an album. A lot of the music I listen to has eight to ten songs on an album, but as I remember, more popular music typically has more than twelve songs per album.
Somebody needs to do the legwork and figure out how many individual songs were sold at the other retailers and divide that by twelve as well.
I think they may have chosen twelve as the number of songs per album to make a splash... this story has been reported all over the place, if iTunes hadn't made the list at all it would be a non-issue. They could basically choose to put iTunes wherever they wanted on this list.
sig.
What if your CD is lost, or scratched? You expect to get a shiny new one at the store you bought it from?
CDs still work with a certain amount of scratches? How many bits can go wrong in an AAC and still allow it to play?
CDs are easily backed up. When they are lost it is generally a direct loss, I left it somewhere, not an indirect loss, my house burned down and my CDs were destroyed. The AAC files are subject to an indirect loss via a hard drive going bad. More importantly CDs give you everything that downloads do. Rip the CD and you have your digital media without DRM. You could make CDs from your downloads and rip those without DRM but you are starting from a low quality source. I'm sure it will still sound good on my iPod but I am concerned that someday when I have a quality home stereo capable of accessing my MP3's the low quality source will be noticable. CDs seem more future proof. You have more control over file format, sampling rate, etc.
CDs do not have DRM (yes there are a handful of exceptions) and are not tied to a particular machine or device. Yes Apple has a reasonable policy but CDs have a better policy.
The Apple store is a valid tradeoff of functionality for price but it is not superior to CDs beyond price and I guess immediacy.
Not sure if this helps --- on macintosh, try senuti http://wbyoung.ambitiouslemon.com/senuti/ I used to offload an ipod full of stuff into a new iTunes library.
*waves hand*
These are not the CD sales you are looking for.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Online, CDBaby [cdbaby.com] nearly outsells Amazon.com, yet it's nowhere to be seen in this chart.
Uh. Do you have any particular reason that I should believe you more than this chart?
Comment of the year
Urm, yeah.
So far, I only see one person (two if you count Anonymous Cowards as separate people - which I don't) talking about CDBaby - I smell a shill. The GP asked about the iTMS.
"selling music only usable in their own player" - this is true if you can't - or can't be bothered - burning and re-ripping. Yes, it's two more steps, but it works.
"If Microsoft sold a MS-created player that only played "Microsoft music..." - but that's not what the iPod is - my iPod is loaded with Apple music, Audible books, ripped CD tracks and all the things I got from mp3.com years ago.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Did they sell more than Apple? I think the other Apple might want a piece of the pie.
Their and your are possessive forms used as modifiers before nouns. They basically mean "belonging to them" and "belonging to you," respectively: "their problem," "your idea." You're is a contraction of "you are": "You're doing fine." And there is a word functioning in various parts of speech, but basically referring to a place: "Your umbrella is over there."
You can remember their by noting that it looks like they, except the y is changed to i and an r is added at the end. If you keep this in mind you also won't spell it thier. You can remember your by noting that other pronouns also have possessive forms that end in an r: her, our, their. Also note that no possessive pronoun contains an apostrophe. (This should also help you in making the distinction between its and it's.)
I doubt you even ever listened to a song from the iTunes store. If you had, you'd know that they aren't MP3, but AAC. The quality of the songs on iTunes is very good. I'm also a headphone listener, and I can't hear the difference between an iTunes song and CD. Of course, I'm not a pro, either.
An expense is incurred in reproducing a physical object. Not so in duplicating a downloadable MP3
The context of your comment made it seem as if possibly that were a reason to prefer the CD, but says to me MP3's are better as they are easier to back up. With a CD you have to go through the work of ripping and then make sure you hang onto both digtal and physical media; easier to just have the digital file and anyone with a computer should have a good backup procedure anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So next year Apple has to re-negotiate thier contract.
The labels want to charge $2 (or more) for some songs - Apple wants to keep it the same. I would think having sales larger than some physical stores would give Apple some leverage to say "Well Sony, you can disagree if you like but do you really want to loose out on sales of this magnitude? People will just go back to downloading music and the labels that do sign with us will have a lot of money coming in you wont have..."
If there's one thing it's hard for the music industry to turn down, it's solid recurring revenue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What are you talking about? CDbaby is how independent bands without a record deal get on iTMS.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Seriously... if you read the about page for cdbaby it is quite clear that their sales aren't even in the same league. I'm not sure how a small fraction of Amazon.com sales == nearly outsells.
AAC supports bookmarking, which is invaluable when listening to audiobooks or Podcasts. If you stop listening to a song with one of those two tags, iTunes or your iPod will remember where you stopped listening and the next time you play that song it will resume at that location.
That would fucking suck. I hope he had renters or homeowners insurance.
:)
Things like fires are why you want to have offsite backups for your most important data. I have a friend who got rid of all his paper records; he scanned reciepts and statements onto his computer, which he backed up to DVD. Except when he was moving, he hydroplaned his car off the side of the highway and punctered the gas tank. He's lucky he was able to get out of his car, because it started on fire rather spectacularly.
However, right when all those electronic records would have been very handy to send to his insurance agent, they were stored on his laptop, which was in the backseat of his car. He did have backups to DVD-R, but those too were with the laptop, which are all now a lump of melted plastic and metal by the side of an interstate.
Or so he thought anyway. As it turns out he had 2 identical disk wallets, one for data and one for music, and he got the two mixed up. So a couple of weeks later he found the other wallet with his backup disks, but in the meantime it was a couple of hairy weeks. What added insult to injury is that a cop gave him a reckless driving ticket when he just lost his car and over $5000 worth of stuff in his car.
There are some excellent classical CDs for more like $10.00 than $30.00, if you don't insist on the big name conductors and orchestras. Sure, sometimes those "International Generic Orchestra" titles are a disappointment but there have been some real gems.
And don't forget used record stores.
If you look this "Partner Companies" page at cdbaby, you see that virtually all those services are paying them about the same amount per song, regardless of whether they're supposedly a flat or variable price service. Looks like they are happy to use the fixed price model when the "label" is interested in it.
I wonder if all the talk from the labels about iTMS "inevitably" going to variable pricint is really an attempt to defuse a move the other way, to fixed pricing at other services.
Back when something like this happened to me I actually had gone over the limit of enabled computers because of sequential disk failures. I emailed apple, they reset my account, I logged in again and reenabled my computer and was back up in no time.
Later on, when my daughter had the same problem, they had actually added a "reset all my activations" button.
Did you call Apple about this? They were completely ready to accomodate me, I'm sure they'd have done the same for you.
iTMS = iTunes Music Store
Yea I agree the ipods will be on alot of gift lists this christmas and as a result more tunes and videos will be downloaded more than any other year ever. Should be a great coming year for those padcasting and flashcasting!
this I can not argue --______-