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iTunes Sales Ban Does Increase CD Sales
Guinnessy writes "According to the New York Times, some music labels have deliberately stopped selling some new singles on online stories such as iTunes or Rhapsody while promoting songs on the radio, so that listeners will rush out to buy the CD album instead. The album appears in itunes at a later date. Not everyone seems to think this is a good idea. From the article: 'The labels are shooting themselves in the foot,' says Rhapsody's Tim Quirk. However, Ne-Yo's CD In My Own Words sold 301,000 copies using this method. Chris Brown's Run It, that was in the itunes store, sold 154,000 copies in its first week. Ne-Yo's So Sick was downloaded approximately 3.4 million times on the peer to peer networks during the week of his album release while the album Run It!"was downloaded approximately 5.3 million times in the same release period."
From the article..."Island Def Jam offered a discount to retailers who stocked the album, allowing it to sell at stores like Target for $7.98 last week" This is a great example of someone making up stupid numbers. The fact that more CD's were sold because there no downloads sold makes complete sense. If these people, who were going to legitimately buy a CD could not buy it online, then they would buy it in the store. If they were allowed to buy it online, would they buy it TWICE? The important figure (which are not revealed in this meticulously researched article) is which way did they make more money or which way did they move more units. The fact that they sell less CD's when there is another format to buy the media should not be a surprise to anyone (except for record execs, who can't count).
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
One sample? You draw conclusions from ONE sample? Hire some statistician, would you?
There are SO many variables to be taken into account that could influence that. Do they target the same audience? To give a very drastic example, if you compare CD sales to download of a Techno song and a Country song, it does NOT matter when it comes out on which medium to predict almost flawlessly which one has a higher download and which one has a higher CD count.
Were they released at the same time? If it is released around Xmas, that would boost CD sales compared to downloads (it IS after all easier to wrap a CD in gift paper than a bunch of bits). What's the weather like on release day? Bad weather and I'd rather download it instead of going out in the pouring rain.
Do the CDs offer the same "goodies" that come with the CD? Do they both offer the lyrics in the booklet, for example, or some pictures of the artist? How about the CD cover?
So please, before drawing conclusion from ONE SINGLE sample, at least make absolutely sure that the results are comparable. Or, better, get a few 100 samples before jumping to a conclusion!
Aaaaaand, let's not forget: If it's not available from legal download... especially if the CD is DRMed into uselessness.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... people turn to newspapers after leading news agencies refuse to publish new content and breaking news on their websites.
Nothing more statistically meaningful than a single data point! Their powers of extrapolation are mind boggling!
now that we've compared 2 artists we finally know the truth about music consumer habits!
-- lol pwned
"If you're buying a Picasso," he continued, "you can't just buy the upper right-hand corner."
This is a weird analogy... if I buy a single song... that's not like buying the upper right hand corner of a Picasso (though with some of Picasso's work I might enjoy it more). It's just like buying a single painting... you select the one you prefer and purchase it. You don't need to buy the whole body of work that an artist produces to appreciate the artist... a song I would equate to a single painting... meanwhile an album is just multiple paintings by the same artist.
At a buck a download... wouldn't they make more off of the album than at the 8 dollars they are selling the thing at Target for? How much does it cost to produce and distribute these CD's to each of the retail chains? How many of those CD's that are produced are in fact sold? So how many just sit on the shelves forever? Or... if you don't produce enough to meet demand... how much money have you lost opportunity costs?
Digital just seems so much more efficient... and this robbing peter to pay paul is silly... yes if you only sell a track in a single medium... of course the volume will rise for that medium... but in the end are you making more money or less? (Say you sold 300,000 tracks on iTunes... cost/benefit?)
Digital uptake is just ramping... if they start doing silly things like this to make it harder for consumers to get their content... either they'll go back to piracy... or it'll stop the whole legal digital distribution before it's even had a chance to become mainstream.
Search online before you rush out and drive 15 miles in your SUV to get that latest CD.
Message to the music industry:
The horse and buggy distro system of funny plastic disks has been superceded by an Internet. Tune in or drop out.
I'd like to see if there are any statistics on which initial purchase method is released into the P2P arena.
If it's the CD rip that eventually gets on the networks or the iTunes. If they had a simple watermark at the end of the song that would show up in the resulting encodings and be detected they could track which method is actually contributing to piracy. If people who are more likely to purchase a CD and rip it to serve on the file sharing networks or if it's the iTunes users that serve it up. With a couple hundred songs marked and tracked that'd be compelling data either way.
In any case all it takes is one person to borrow/buy/steal/download a track and serve it up.
It makes a lot more sense to make it cheap enough and easy enough to get a song that illegally downloading it is not benificial. Not threatening them with vague lawsuites that people really don't care about. And not DRM crap that makes it better to download it illegally to use on the multitude of products out there being marketed by the same companies that restrict the customers ability to use them (cough-sony-cough).
If there were a service that let people pay a small price for music by the track in a high quality standardized format and allowed them to do whatever they wanted with it without any draconian DRM restrictions, it would be an alternative that would capture the majority of the market share overnight. And at the same time would make the p2p networks that much less attractive.
(didn't hear it from me, allofmp3)
It's not something new, but needs to be said again to these execs: Basic economics 101, if you offer an easier product at a cheaper price without a significant quality drop you will make more money in volume than your competitors.
The competitors in this case are virus ridden, illegal, spotty selection, gun to the head, can go away at any time, P2P networks.
You hear that RIAA? You could make millions happy, rake in billions of dollars in sales, have more volume with significantly less overhead and 3rd party costs. All you have to do is look at the market and act like business people and fulfill the obvious need.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.