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iTMS Moving Up The Sales Charts

Posted by Zonk on from the lots-of-lost-fans dept.

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."

11 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Good news by xfletch · · Score: 5, Interesting
    But the reason I don't buy music there is that if I am spending that much cash, I want to own something more concrete. What if my computer is lost, or the data corrupted? With a CD I can always re-rip, but with just the MP3 file it would be gone forever...

    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?

    1. Re:Good news by vought · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Sure my old library was there but it was drmed and grayed out. I tried to remerge and set myself as teh new owner of the ipod since I tried all options. Itunes deleted about $400 worth of music and wiped my whole collection clean. :-(

      Here's an article that details the several options on each platform for solving exactly the problem you found yourself with.

      You could argue that Apple should provide a "Restore from iPod" provision in iTunes, or a low-cost "Redownload all my shit" option, but wouldn't have just been easier to Google the answer to your $400.00 problem or to back up your system in the first place?

      Complaining on Slashdot is easier that using Google, I guess.

    2. Re:Good news by jrockway · · Score: 5, Informative

      Something similar happened to me. I mailed Apple and they let me redownload anything (and added something to the effect of, "don't do this again").

      Did you even think to e-mail Apple after they wiped out $400, or did you just make up the story and the whine on slashdot?

      --
      My other car is first.
    3. Re:Good news by the_Pnut · · Score: 5, Informative
      Have you ever tried this?

      I called the tech support number on iTunes and told them that the hard drive on my computer failed, and that I lost all my songs. The lady I talked to spent 5 minutes with me "refreshing" my account. At the end I opened iTunes, clicked on advanced-> check for purchases, and then all of the songs I had bought from iTunes re-downloaded. That didn't help for all the songs I had that I did not buy from iTunes, but apple was very easy to deal with, and allowed me to "re-own" the music I had bought from them. Now I run a back up script every week, cause it's just easier, but apple definitely lets to download your music again if you wish too.

      Also, if you want something more "concrete" you can burn from apple's lossless format to a CD, and then put the CD in your rack.

  2. The run-up to Christmas? by KingSkippus · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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 are many present lists.

    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?

    1. Re:The run-up to Christmas? by FishandChips · · Score: 5, Funny

      He's only an analyst. Be gentle with him. He probably thinks everyone gets a $250,000 Christmas bonus.

      --
      Las qué passoun
      tournoun pas maï
  3. Hopefully everyone... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ...who has said "If someone can get something for free, they sure as hell won't buy it!" will shut up now. A large proportion of people - certainly enough to keep a business afloat - will pay for things by default, but get put off due to "value additions" such as draconian DRM or the general attitude from most media companies that all of their customers are thieves*. Apple has grasped that it is not necessarily cost that deters people from buying but inconvenience, and so by stream-lining the process of payment and delivery so that it is almost imperceptible - so, in fact, the customer can almost forget that they are "buying" anything at all! - they have managed to shore up such massive sales as to be an embarrassment to the RIAA. We see a similar thing with, of all things, mobile-phone ringtones - massive quantities are available online for free, but the fact that buying a ringtone is so much easier has led to this unfathomable market [if you had told me that such crappy "products" as ringtones would have been even mildly profitable a few years back, I'd have thought you were mad!] raking in billions per year.

    * 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

  4. Back up your data! by Vandil+X · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Re:new business practises by iReflect · · Score: 5, Informative

    cdbaby.net/dd

  6. Oh, let's just get this over with... by jpellino · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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."
  7. Appropriate Hardware by MisterSquid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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