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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
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?
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
Margins, he said. After bandwidth, administration, credit card charges, server rooms, and development, I'm sure Apple doesn't have too much of that 28 cents left. However, even a 2 penny margin can add up if the numbers are right, and it's used strategically - *wink*.
Damn those pesky terrorists
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...
Somehow I get the feeling the record companies are the ones cashing in.
Apple cashes in now on ipods, and later on music when the record companies are obsolete.
They don't have to worry about margins on music just now so long as it's in profit and growing the market.
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.
No, they don't.
Throw the bums out!
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".