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.'"

Comments

MP3 market penetration

[dannytaggart]

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.

Imagine how much more they could sell

[Saint37]

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 all about visions

[argoff]

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.

KaZaa

[amazon10x]

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

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))

Gives Apple good leverage in contract negotiations

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Gives Apple good leverage in contract negotiati

[TubeSteak]

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."

Re:Illogical arguments are still arguments...

[friedmud]

Your statement describes my situation...

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 ;-)... 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 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