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Digital Music Enjoys Golden Week
An anonymous reader writes to tell us Yahoo News is reporting that the last week of December turned out to be a golden week for music downloads. From the article: 'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers, Nielsen SoundScan reports. In the process, consumers shattered the tracking firm's one-week record for download sales.'"
I found this even more interesting:
And for the first time, sales of MP3 players are surpassing sales of personal CD players and CD shelf systems
Something for the music industry to think about.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
If the RIAA had not angered so many customers, they would have sold alot more songs. Unfortunately, I know alot of people who won't buy any music at all until the middleman is removed.
http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/
It's not the RIAA I worry about anymore, it's the MPAA (movie guys). At least with music the case is generally that there's good music out there we want to hear but can't seem to get it in a usable, portable format for multiple device consumption. With movies, we don't even want to see most of them, so their blaming things on piracy will just get worse when no one goes to see movies again in 2006.
It really is all about visions. To many of us, the intnernet envisions a future with the uninhibited unrestricted free flow of information - where all knowledge and creative works will be birthed into the world thru creative collaberation, or thru services, or thru just plain giving for free as a side effect of private interests. To the music industry, and the RIAA in particular, the internet envisions a future where every piece of content is tagged and charged for with the promise of unlimited profit and royality and the prospect of endlessly being able to nickel and dime the consumer to the highest order - but to inpose this vision requires that they coerce upon people and technology companies, an infrastructure of controll - where no piece of information can leak out and risk becomming free.
Moral: This is like an ALL or NOTHING game
People who want to play half hearted, and allow some room for copyrights in this age are only going to continue to feed the beast that is trying to enslave them. Copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off peoples freedom until we cut it off at the root. One of these days people are going to realise that copyrights are not about artists, writers, developers, incentive, or "property", or even profit, they are only about control. Controll, even if that means the loss of privacy, free speech, and controll over our PC's.
Well, apparently a lot of people are also getting their music from KaZaa et al. MSNBC says, "Some analysts expect Apple to have shipped 37 million iPods worldwide by the year-end, with about 10 million sold in the key Christmas quarter."
That would mean everyone who just got their new iPods have loaded a whopping 2 songs onto it. Who said 30GB wouldn't come in handy?
Assuming people are listening to 128Kbps mp3s on their digital audio players and assuming each song is approximately 4 minutes long it would require 8416 music tracks to fill up a 30GB iPod. This means that KaZaa also enjoyed brisk success with 42,000,000,000 downloads (assuming everyone filled up half their iPod with videos (no, I won't go into the videos right now))
their industry lost $7.8 billion the last week of 2005
Pretty shortly Apple has to re-negotiate the contracts with the studios - at which point they will push for higher song prices.
These record sales will help Apple maintain the current pricing, as the more money flowing into the studios through ITMS the harder it will be for all or most of them to pull away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How come, when we're talking about Apple, no one brings up the idea that in the next round of negotiations, Apple might try to get a bigger cut?
It would kinda be like Disney and Pixar. Sure Disney can make their own money, but Pixar has been generating crazy amounts of money for them.
I have a tough time seeing how the RIAA's music companies can walk away from iTunes without having to deal with some kind of shareholder lawsuit.
I can understand that they have to make a good faith effort to get more cash out of Apple, but what are they going to say if Apple refuses? "Apple wouldn't give us more money, so we decided to cut off this money maker entirely."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
Your statement describes my situation...
;-)... Even so, I have 167 items currently in my library. How is this possible? _All_ of the rest are rips of my CDs (basically all the CDs I've bought in the last 2 years... I haven't gotten around to ripping the old stuff).
I got an ipod nano for christmas (well, and a combined birthday present since my birthday is around christmas) and I have bought a total of 1 song and 1 video (yes, I know the nano can't play video... but I go to UT and _had_ to buy the highlights for the rose bowl
I have not a _single_ illegal song in my collection but haven't bought many either.
Further, my brother in law also got an ipod (shuffle) and got a $10 gift certificate from itunes (from me)... by the time I had left his house 4 days after christmas... he _still_ hadn't spent it all (he had bought about 8 songs). He was also filling up his collection with CDs....
So I think the 10 songs per 1 ipod sounds about right. Despite what _we_ make think here on slashdot, there are an awful lot of consumers out there who got ipods for christmas and don't know a damn thing about any P2P networks or how to get "illegal" songs.... all of these people just install itunes and enjoy how easy it is to buy music (unless you like Evanescence...).
Friedmud
Unless everyone bought a $200+ player to listen to the same 10 songs over and over, they're getting songs from elsewhere, which must be illegally.
I have around 850 legally purchased CDs and about 300 vinyl records. The total cost of the collection would approach $20,000, and until recently I was buying a several new CDs every month. I have bought a few locally produced CDs over the past year or so, but none from the major ARIA/RIAA companies, and I have no intention of purchasing from those companies ever as a result of their unethical practices.
I welcome every dirty sleazy DRM effort the RIAA member companies attempt, because every trick they play, every downloader they harass, every squeeze they make, gives more traction and more income to the independant musicians who value their fans and make music for the sake of the music.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
"Digital Music Enjoys Golden Week"
"RIAA Executives Enjoy Golden Shower From Customers"
'In the seven-day stretch between Christmas and the new year, millions of consumers armed with new MP3 players (primarily iPods) and stacks of gift cards gobbled up almost 20 million tracks from iTunes and other download retailers' (Emphasis mine)
/. hordes, but I don't expect it from so-called professional companies (yeah, yeah, Slashdot is a professional company, OSTG and all that, but this is a news aggregator, it's not supposed to be their speciality to do the sort of reporting Nielsen has done here).
Bad Nielsen Soundscan! Your fanboyism is showing! Precisely what was the point of mentioning that the MP3 player most bought was the iPod? The one I bought myself certainly wasn't; the one I bought my girlfriend certainly wasnt; who cares? Not everyone is painfully in love with the iPod and it's line of bastard cousins.
I'm used to this sort of Apple/iPod namedropping from the
Am I the only one left who can't bear to go one story without some reference to how superior I am to everyone else for having the sense to buy a particular brand of pocket MP3 player?
-1, Flamebait, sure, but this is really getting rediculous.
(For the record, I am a happy Mac user on the desktop)
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.